Robert Dutt: Hello and welcome to In The Channel from ChannelBuzz.ca, bringing news and information to the Canadian IT channel community for the last sixteen years. I’m Robert Dutt, editor at ChannelBuzz.ca and your host for the show. You want to understand how a global technology vendor thinks about its partner program, not the press release version, but the actual mechanics of how design decisions get made and how they land in markets like Canada. Today’s conversation is a fairly rare opportunity. We have at the same time the global architect of the Lenovo partner ecosystem and the Canadian channel chief.

Jeff Taylor is executive director of global partner ecosystem and operations for Lenovo, responsible for the Lenovo 360 framework that governs how the company works with partners worldwide and for the new consolidated partner ecosystems and program structure for the international markets that Lenovo unveiled earlier this year. Craig Taylor is senior director and Canada channel chief at Lenovo, a 2026 CRN channel chief and the person responsible for translating all that global framework into real outcomes for Canadian partners on the ground.

We recorded this conversation just after Lenovo 360 Accelerate, the company’s annual North American partner event wrapped up in Austin, Texas. So this is about as fresh a read on the state of the Lenovo partner ecosystems you’re gonna get. We covered the dramatic simplification of Lenovo’s incentive structure, the push towards services-led selling and recurring revenue, how AI is reshaping both the partner conversation with customers and Lenovo’s own approach to enablement, and how Canadian partners should be thinking about a volatile period in hardware pricing.

And yes, they’re both named Taylor. We had asked some questions. Let’s get right into it. My chat with Jeff Taylor and Craig Taylor. [Music]

Gentlemen, thank you for taking the time.

Jeff Taylor: Hey Robert, how are you?

Robert Dutt: Very well, thank you.

Craig Taylor: Excellent. Good afternoon, Robert.

Robert Dutt: Interesting situation, one of those channel journalist dream situations, chatting with both the global architect of the partner program and the Canadian channel chief at the same time. And as fate would have it, you’re both just coming back from Austin. Jeff, for people who weren’t there in the room for Accelerate this year, the event was themed “unified as one” — pretty deliberate choice of words, I dare say. What were you trying to signal with that framing?

Jeff Taylor: Yeah, well, I mean, obviously one with our partners is probably the first and foremost thing, but also to represent Lenovo holistically. From Motorola all the way through our devices, tablets, PCs, etc. and then into the data center. So we are one company and as an extension of that, one company includes our partners and the whole intent of the event was to bring everybody together and unify. Feedback has been really, really positive and it’s, you know, it’s only been a week, but lots of really good discourse and wonderful event.

Robert Dutt: Craig, from a Canadian perspective, what did the Canadian attendance look like and what did Austin feel like compared to previous Accelerate events from a Canadian partner point of view?

Craig Taylor: Yeah, our Canadian partners had very positive feedback to Jeff’s point. We’re always very well represented in these types of North American based events. We always punch above our weight class, I’d like to say. So all of the key strategic partners across our ecosystem were there in present and actively participating in our discussions as to how we’re going to strategize for our next fiscal year.

Robert Dutt: Jeff, one thing that stood out for me from Austin was the choice of putting Jay McBain, Steve Brazier and Tiffany Bova on stage together, three analysts who ostensibly compete against each other in the market. Curious what the goal was in putting them together and what came out of that conversation that you think partners should take away.

Jeff Taylor: Yeah, I think a couple of things. First of all, the moderator of that panel was with Alex Smith. So we had four great analysts all on the stage at the same time. I think if you take a step back and just look at the theme overall, what we’re trying to accomplish at Accelerate, it was really about industry topics. So we had representatives from the US Department of Energy as an example, talking about power and what’s happening at a governmental level. And part of that was to get these four analysts together who, as you say, they mix in a lot of the same circles, but they’d never been on the stage at the same time. And the idea was to propagate a little bit. And in some cases, they were aligned in a lot of their messages to the channel. In some cases, they differed. And it was a really lively and engaging conversation. And folks at Lenovo, we engage with these folks all the time, but having them all together, kind of representing their unique perspectives on the market right now was super valuable and engaging.

Robert Dutt: So to dig into what you guys have been doing on the partner side of things, back in March, you announced the new consolidated partner ecosystem and programs, International Markets Organization. Now that Accelerate’s happened, partners have had a chance to hear it explained in person. What’s the clearest way to explain what operationally changed and what didn’t? Because from the outside, centralize where it makes sense can go a lot of different directions.

Jeff Taylor: Yeah, look, I think the easiest way to explain it is we now have a single common framework across the globe. That framework is a guidepost, very intentionally set up as a framework, because execution has to remain local. And the input, the guidance, the feedback that we receive from our Canadian partners, from Craig, representing the viewpoints of those Canadian partners is absolutely critical to what we’re doing. And so by, you know, over time, as we had a lot of different markets and a lot of different geographies kind of expand over time as the company grew, there was similar objectives happening in multiple markets. And maybe the execution model was slightly different. And we thought by kind of bringing some of that together, we could simplify and we could gain efficiencies for our partners. But it’s really important to understand that the execution happens locally, sales happens locally, channel partners happen locally. And so it’s one really about standardizing the framework and not centralizing execution.

Robert Dutt: How has that landed here in Canada, both with Canadian partners and in terms of how things operate for you, Craig?

Craig Taylor: Yeah, the feedback has been really positive, Rob. You know, from a Canadian perspective, it’s all about leveraging our local teams and our local relationships, which haven’t changed. And feedback from our partner community is we are often best in class when it comes to how we represent our organization in front of the partner ecosystem. What I think is what more exciting for me now is we’re elevating those relationships to be consistent as to how we’re going to market with our partners. Consistency in the programs, consistency in the incentives, and also how quickly we can execute. What that means is our partner facing team can spend more time in market with our partners trying to win opportunities together with our mutual customers.

Jeff Taylor: And if I could add, Rob, real quick, I mean, this was a very thoughtful process. This wasn’t something that happened kind of quick and without a lot of forethought. We have been working on this for years through the introduction of Lenovo 360 as that kind of framework itself. And then over time, as we’ve built some meat on the skeleton, the timing was just really right for us to go do this. But again, that premise of local execution is probably the most important thing.

Robert Dutt: Well, I know that internally you guys have kind of had the mantra of “global might, local fight” internally for a while now, kind of being applied to the partner org, it seems here. I guess I’m still a little curious where there is a certain tension between global consistency and local relevance. You’ve kind of unpacked it, but where does that actually land in terms of which side takes the lead?

Jeff Taylor: Yeah. So let me give you some real tangible numbers and examples. Three years ago in market across the globe, we had 2,300 active incentives in the market. I’m going to repeat that. We had 2,300 active incentives in the market. So if you think of your investment pool as a pizza, right, and you divide that 2,300 ways, the relative impact of those individual slices can be quite small. Now, what we found in talking to markets was that there was absolutely a consistency and intent. And maybe that intent was new customer acquisition, or maybe it was growth targets, or maybe it was something else. There was consistency in intent, but the execution was different, and that created operational complexity. It created our ability to report seamlessly and consistently over time more of a challenge than simplification. So in just the last two years, we’ve gone from that 2,300 partner incentives to about 200. So almost a 92% reduction without any change in investments, any negative change in investments, because the intent was still there, right? The intent was consistent across the globe. So that’s one where we centrally can look at the forest through the trees. We can see an opportunity for simplification. Then we can bring that to the markets while still driving that strategic intent that we want to accomplish with our partners. So that’s just one example.

Craig Taylor: Yeah, well said. Just to add to that, Rob, one of the things that was very important was to make sure we had local input to the global framework that was being created at Jeff’s level. So we had many conversations as to what our market needs and demands were, and make sure that we shaped it to be properly represented within the framework. That worked out very, very well. We also are allowed to have some nuances in this organization as well. And so what we’re allowed to do is perhaps if a certain pathway doesn’t make sense to the Canadian market, for example, being more of an SMB-based market, we’re going to pivot and we’re going to make those changes to make sure that we service our partners the best that we should. And kind of beef up that SMB-facing side of things.

Robert Dutt: Yeah, that makes sense.

Jeff Taylor: It’s really interesting. It’s interesting, Robert. From day one, we called Lenovo 360 a framework and not a program from day one. And the whole idea was that we wanted to ask three basic questions like, how do you best engage with your partners? How do you best connect with your partners and how do you best grow with your partners? But depending on the conversation, the answers to those three questions might be different. So as an example, if you’re talking to a traditional hardware solution provider, you have answers for those three questions. If you’re talking to a GSI or an MSP or an MSSP, same questions may be very different answers. And so the whole idea with this framework was to be able to flex accordingly. And that went down all the way to the market level. So Craig mentioned that Canadian being more oriented towards an SMB type of approach, the framework has to flex to be able to support that. Whereas in other markets, it may flex a slightly different way, but it’s still all about engaging, connecting and growing.

Robert Dutt: OK, back to your pizza point, Jeff, and one of my favorite, probably apocryphal Yogi Berra quotes, “cut my pizza in four slices, please, I can’t eat eight.” Curious, though, for a partner who looks at it and says, “all right, well, I used to have three incentives applied to my business and now there’s only really the one. The math doesn’t work for me.” What’s sort of the answer for them? Because the earning power says we didn’t take away the earning power.

Jeff Taylor: So again, it’s the intent stays the same. The earning power stayed the same. The whole idea now is operationally, it should be easier for… the intent was that it would be easier for the partners to have a path towards that earning power. So instead of Jenga or a very complicated jigsaw puzzle, the intent here was to simplify that. So it’s a clear path to that earning potential with the same intent around growth, acquisition, those types of things.

Craig Taylor: Yeah. And Robert, one of the things our partners have been asking us for is to provide more direction, focus as to where they want us to go win together in the market. And I think by simplifying these programs, it’s also allowed us to provide more focus to our partner community in the ecosystem to make sure that we’re winning together in the areas that we want to win.

Jeff Taylor: And Robert, it goes beyond just traditional incentives programs, too. So we’ve simplified things like our certification programs. I’m going to get this number slightly wrong, but in the ballpark, in the last two years, we’ve driven 80,000 new certifications globally through some of the simplified changes that we’ve made. So all of these things, it’s look at the globe and then apply it locally. And again, with the full intent of making it as easy as possible for the partner.

Robert Dutt: As with most partner programs slash framework changes, updates, you’ve acknowledged that some partners will land at a different tier under the new structure. How are you managing the transition and what should a partner do if they feel the new placement doesn’t reflect where they’re actually at in the relationship with Lenovo?

Jeff Taylor: We’re very conscious about that. And I think, Robert, you know, any time there’s even a small change in some type of construct within the program, there’s some unfortunate circumstances associated with that. But we really tried to minimize it. And I’ll just give another example to hit a tier level. We have a volume requirement. OK, that’s the framework. But what that volume requirement is, it’s going to differ by market. So, you know, it might be very different in the U.S. than it is in France, than it is in Canada, than it is in Indonesia, as an example. And the whole intent there was through our analysis was to kind of minimize those impacts as much as possible while still creating the right type of incentive and the right value associated with each of those tier levels.

Craig Taylor: And to that point, Robert, it was very thoughtful in Canada as to what the thresholds should be in order to properly reflect our market. And what’s happened as a result of that is over 90 percent of the partners have either maintained or actually improved their tier status as a result of the simplification and restructuring. What we’re doing with that remaining 10 or less than 10 percent is getting out in front of our foot, making sure that we have those discussions, working together through joint business plans to determine how we’re going to get them not only to the next threshold, but have a future plan to get us to the one after that and up-tier them as we continue our relationships with them.

Robert Dutt: The services shift. Jeff, you put out a specific target there in recent interviews. 15 to 20 percent of partner revenue mix coming from services and solutions over the next year or two. The services business, as I understand it, has grown in the channel for the last five years or so with channel growth outpacing overall growth. That’s certainly real numbers and real growth. What’s driving customers towards the as-a-service and TruScale model specifically right now?

Jeff Taylor: Yeah, I think it’s one word. It’s complementary. Our strategic approach is to have complementary services to those of our partners. We want to be able to ensure that our mutual end users are getting the best possible experience that they can get. In many cases, those services are provided 100 percent by the partner themselves. But in other cases where they don’t have those capabilities, our job is to complement those with the service capabilities that we have. The idea is that, first of all, I think you know Robert, the services space, like the TAM, is massive. There’s so much opportunity really for everybody to play in a meaningful way. You just have to be smart about it. I think that’s the first thing. The second thing is communicate. If there is an instance in which maybe there’s a perception of competing for services revenue, we’re going to communicate. We’re going to talk. We’re going to figure out what the best solution is for that end user and then move forward that way.

Craig Taylor: Yeah, the other thing I would add and maybe another word for thought is flexibility as well. Feedback from our Canadian partners is that the Lenovo TruScale offering is much more flexible than other competitive offerings in market. Because we understand that not all customers look and feel the same. So this allows our partners to scale with us during their journey as they create more of a services-led go-to-market motion for their customers.

Jeff Taylor: One of the conversations, Robert, that came out, you mentioned the Accelerate event last week in Austin. Obviously, a lot of discussions around AI and a lot of discussions around how do we best build an AI practice to go serve customers, whether they’re small businesses or large enterprises. And that’s a really scary thing for a lot of solution providers right now because they see that market exploding and they want to get it right. And this is a great example of where Lenovo can come in and partner with our partners on developing an AI practice that includes not just hardware and software, but also services.

Robert Dutt: Craig, for a Canadian partner to whom Lenovo still means primarily ThinkPads and infrastructure hardware, what’s the first move usually looked like for a partner who wants to shift towards services with you guys and where are most partners sitting today against that 15-20% target?

Craig Taylor: Yeah, great question. I think Jeff mentioned it earlier. It’s about communication. Often, it’s a miss when we don’t understand the partner services capabilities. We are a channel-led organization. We’ll continue to be with our services engagement in order to scale and address the Canadian customers. We need the channel and we will continue to work with the channel in order to win in services, but we have to understand what it is they can offer. So our team is working very closely with our partner community through this joint business partner plan in order to understand and make sure that we’re aligning their services capabilities with the needs of those customers. That’s first. Second of all is internally, we’re making sure that we have a motto of sell with, sell for, and sell through the channel. And so our Lenovo customer-facing sales teams understand the importance and the value that our partners are bringing to our mutual customers. And together, we’re winning more than we ever have before.

Jeff Taylor: Hey Robert, there’s almost like a macroeconomic driver here as well. So partners are, and we’re seeing this globally, that there’s a realization that to maximize the value, to increase the multiple on their valuation, a move towards MRR or ARR models is extremely important, right? And those are services-led models. And so we are seeing a lot of these traditional partners who are very accustomed as us being a PC or an infrastructure provider, really needing our help in moving towards this recurring revenue model that’s going to increase their valuation and their multiples. So we’re seeing that trend everywhere right now, probably more so in North America than anywhere else, but it’s definitely happening globally.

Robert Dutt: To that point where I wanted to go next was the MSP pathway. 3,000 partners signed up globally, 150 million or so last year for you guys, real proof point. You’re expanding to new geographies. What can you tell me about where that pathway is at in Canada? And as you’ve expanded geographically, are there any new developments on the Canadian front, either announced at Accelerate or along the way?

Jeff Taylor: Why don’t I take kind of the big picture and then Craig can go deeper into Canada? Again, this move towards recurring revenue models is happening everywhere. And so not only has Lenovo’s growth in that space been even better than expected, dare I say, we’re seeing it, the growth of MSPs just in pure numbers globally is growing very, very rapidly. And again, I think it’s this financial macroeconomic driver that’s making that happen. To go back to our framework around engaging, connecting and growing, those answers are so different with an MSP than they are with maybe a traditional Lenovo partner. And so we spent the first year developing this program by listening, literally going to conferences, setting up a booth. We had MSPs coming up to us saying, “What are you doing here?” And we would be like, “We’re just listening. We just want to hear what motivates you and what is your business driver.” And so that was the genesis of creating this program because we wanted it to be bespoke specifically for those MSPs that are just operating in a kind of a different way than traditional VARs or traditional service providers. And now I’ll hand it over to Craig.

Craig Taylor: Yeah, no well said. And you’ll see that the way that we’ve set up the Lenovo 360 for MSP pathway is the solutions hub within our online support and the way that we work with those partners looks different. The incentive stack is aligned to the needs, as per Jeff’s saying, and we have dedicated campaigns and road shows and community engagements in order to make sure that we’re addressing the needs of those MSP partners. What’s most exciting in Canada is it’s actually opened up a new route to market for us and new partner relationships where we haven’t had them before. You know, I would say that until this pathway was created, we were probably under penetrated from a Lenovo Canada perspective within the MSP community. Now the opportunity is vast. The partners, those MSP related partners are interested in working with Lenovo more than ever. And I think together we’re going to go win in the market.

Robert Dutt: Are we still in the early innings of operationalizing that and realizing that or is that something that’s sort of matured with the program being out there?

Craig Taylor: I think we already had a head start. And so, you know, some of the relationships with the key MSP partners in the Canadian ecosystem, those relationships already existed. I think this is now an opportunity just to extend our reach and better support the masses of MSP partners that are in the Canadian marketplace. So we’re well down the path, but no pun intended. But I think this framework actually allows us to go even deeper and have more intimate relationships with this set of partners.

Jeff Taylor: I think globally, if I could interject here, we’re probably in the second inning of a nine inning game. There’s so much more we can and we’ll be doing with this MSP community. And at the same time, there’s tens of thousands of MSPs out there. So the opportunity is huge and our interest and our investment kind of matches that opportunity. But we still have many innings to play here. So we’re excited about it.

Robert Dutt: I don’t know if you guys have noticed over the last few months, but memory costs have been a little bit volatile. You guys, you know, Ryan McCurdy was out in front of that publicly and the Top Choice Express model guidance for pricing some of the ISG deals. Real things that partners are navigating. How do you counsel a partner who’s trying to manage customer conversations when prices can shift before product ships? And what specific tools or protections do partners have inside Lenovo right now that they need to know about?

Jeff Taylor: Yeah, again, I’ll just kind of take the big picture here. Lenovo culturally within our partner community has always been one based on trust and communication always. And we’ve navigated tough waters before, whether that was the pandemic or this situation that’s affecting the entire industry. And our approach is complete candor, open communication. We don’t hide behind any potential downside or any risk. We’re very communicative up front as we get information, we share that information. That can at times be frustrating for partners, but at the same time, if they, you know, at the end of the day, when they take a step back, they really appreciate Lenovo just being super transparent. It is a tricky deal right now. It is complicated and things are moving very quickly. I do not envy our sales folks and I don’t envy our partner sellers out there right now because there’s a lot of tricky, tough conversations that have to happen. You had mentioned Top Choice and Top Choice Express. We have invested in a model for Top Choice Express where we do have a supply. We can commit to an order to ship SLA that other vendors can’t right now. And again, I think that’s very well received by the partner community. It may be that the exact configuration is slightly different, but at a time like this, it’s a great way for us to service those customers collectively with our partners and with a high quality solution from Lenovo.

Craig Taylor: Yeah, just to add to that as well, I would say resiliency and agility have always been built into our supply chain. We currently manufacture in over 30 locations in 10 different markets worldwide. That global footprint allows us to be more agile as we go to market during these challenging times. Recently, Gartner has rated us as the number eight most robust supply chain in the world. I think that’s going to work to our advantage as we go and continue through these challenging times.

Robert Dutt: Switching to AI, you guys have posted 72% year-over-year growth in AI-related revenue. I want to unpack that a little bit. Jeff, where’s that coming from? Is that AI PC, infrastructure services, mix of all three through the hybrid AI advantage program and the Nvidia work? What does the enablement for a partner who wants to build an AI practice actually look like?

Jeff Taylor: Lots of questions in there, so let me make sure I can get them all back. In terms of our mix, it really is cross portfolio. We are leading the way in AI PC, which is fantastic. I think we’ve just scratched the surface on that device side. I still think some consumers and users are wondering, what is the real AI value here? Those use cases will continue to come and we’ll continue to see that market expand. In terms of our infrastructure business, everywhere from being able to service the big hyperscalers all the way into the enterprise and the SMB space is a testament to the strength of our portfolio. That growth is represented from everywhere from the hyperscalers to enterprise to mid-market to SMB. Again, on the services side, we talked about that a little bit ago. It’s really about partnering to make that happen. We are very fortunate to have partners. You had mentioned Nvidia, also Intel, also AMD, all the silicon guys are very much working with us on making sure that, A, the solutions are there, and that, B, the way we’re enabling those solutions, which is also a little bit different, Robert. We have to be enabling around outcomes and not around feeds and speeds. You have to be talking to customers about what are they trying to accomplish. It’s not feeds and speeds anymore. How we’re enabling our partners, Craig had mentioned our Lenovo 360 Solution Hub as an example. It is an outcome-based platform where our partners can come in and learn what’s available from an outcome’s perspective. The solutions, the hardware and the software is really incidental to the conversation around the outcome itself. I think all of those things play together.

Robert Dutt: Craig, where do you find Canadian partners are with AI at this point? There’s a spectrum with some building real AI practices, many still figuring out what the first customer conversation looks like. So I guess both acknowledging there’s a range of answers, where do you find partners are at? What’s the realistic, most common entry point for a mid-market focused Canadian partner?

Craig Taylor: Yeah, to answer the first part of the question, it is a vast spectrum as to where each partner is on their AI journey. But rest assured, because of the Lenovo services portfolio, we can actually support each of those partners independently and complement their offerings as they scale their AI journey. I would suggest that many of them probably are moving from proof of concept with their customers to now proof of execution with their customers. More and more, there’s a demand on measuring an ROI on the AI investments that have been made. And I think that’s where partners and customers are looking for Lenovo for some direction. We recently created a CIO playbook, which actually helps our customers and partners be able to capture what that ROI is and what the financial returns are getting as a result of their AI investments. And feedback from that from our partner community has been very good. The other thing I would suggest is that because these AI workloads are now going from modeling into the cloud, now into being actually practically used within the customer sets, it creates a massive opportunity for our infrastructure solutions group business. And you heard Jeff mention that several times. One of the things we’re doing with our partner community is making sure that we’re over-investing with their technical architects and solution architects within the partner community to drive even more familiarity with the Lenovo solutions around AI playbook to make sure that we’re being suggested, recommended, and considered when customers are coming to them for advice.

Robert Dutt: Jeff, Austin’s in the rearview mirror. You got the program changes out. New org is in place. What have you done for me lately? What does the rest of 2026 look like? And what would tell you by year end that this consolidation worked the way you wanted it to?

Jeff Taylor: Yeah, first, I’m going to take a nap. I’m tired. There’s a lot that has to happen. I mean, the first thing is we have a commitment to our partners and to our partners like Craig, our internal partners, that everything continues to move from a local perspective, that we want to make sure that whatever changes we’re making, services our geographies, services our markets, and most importantly, services our partners. So that’s kind of the first priority in my mind to go do that. The second thing, and we briefly mentioned this before, is I think the world of enablement is changing quite a bit. And I think AI is driving that. And we throw around the word transformation quite a bit and things still aren’t really transformative. They’re more evolutionary. I actually think at this point, we’re at a transformative part in terms of channel management. So we are investing heavily in our digital platforms to move from just kind of basic LLM models into AI agents and eventually into agentic AI that’s going to completely change the way that we enable all of our partners, big and small. It’ll be more efficient. It’ll be more intuitive. It’ll be more timely. It’ll be more forward-looking than backwards-looking. I think, Robert, you know most portals are somewhat static and kind of represents yesterday and not tomorrow. I think all of that is going to change. And so a big focus for myself and working very closely with our IT and digital transformations organizations is this reimagination of enablement in this world of AI. And you’ll see more and more from Lenovo in that regard.

Robert Dutt: I think that is going to be one of the most interesting things from a partner program structure point of view over the next couple of years is how you and your peers address those challenges and really potentially change the shape of what programs and enablement look like. It’s exciting.

Jeff Taylor: It really is an exciting time for us channel nerds that have been around for forever. This is like, “Yes, we’re going to be able to rock the world. It’s going to be great.”

Robert Dutt: Craig, for a Canadian partner listening to this, what’s the one thing that you want them to do differently or think differently in their relationship with Lenovo over the next little while?

Craig Taylor: Yeah, I think we’ve talked about some of them already. We need to continue to protect and grow the core, which is our client computing and PC business. We have to grow at a premium to market. And I think we’re well positioned for that. I need the channel community to help us to continue to accelerate our ISG, our infrastructure solutions group business, around the data center to make sure we continue to drive relevance, focus on those technical relationships and leverage Top Choice Express, which will better service all of our customers by getting the right products in their hands quicker. We talked about helping our customers and our partners on this services-led selling journey. So we’re going to spend more time on that. But the last two, I think, are probably where a majority of my focus will be for the second half of the year. The one is continuing to make sure that we demonstrate ourselves as the easiest partner to do business with. So whether it be through our portfolio like Top Seller and Top Choice, whether it be the program optimization that Jeff and his team are doing fabulous work on, or whether it be the alignment of our portfolio coming together to represent one Lenovo, that’s going to be the key to our success and where our partners should continue to challenge us. Internally, I’m challenging my team to operate and act like an owner of your own business. And so we’re empowering our people to make decisions in market in front of their partners in order to have a more agile relationship with those customers. We’re enabling them with the right tools. And then finally, we’re educating them properly to make sure they represent this more complex portfolio of offerings that continues to be positioned in the marketplace and satisfy our customers’ business outcomes. So a lot for the second half of the year, but I’m very bullish that we’re positioned properly for success.

Jeff Taylor: Robert, if you don’t mind, I would add just one quick thing there. And you had mentioned, like, we are in difficult times right now with memory and price increases and things like that. Partners are smart. They are going to lean on the partners that they trust, and they’re going to lean on the partners that have been there with them, or their partners that have been with them through these difficult times previously. And while nobody wants this situation, I think Lenovo is actually in a really good spot right now because we are that trusted advisor and have been for years. It’s not just words, right? It’s years and years and years of building relationships, the work that Craig and his team have done in Canada. You know, we have these relationships that allow us to navigate these waters maybe better than others.

Robert Dutt: And my last super serious question to end this is, I’m basing this on an inference off a small sample size of two. But do you guys have any problems finding Taylors to run the channel orgs in all of the countries you operate in worldwide?

Jeff Taylor: Go ahead, Craig. Say what you always say.

Craig Taylor: Listen, I like to tease Jeff that he’s my dad, but our age delta is probably much more closer than makes that physically possible. But hey, listen, we’re going to take the best of the best. We happen to get two Taylors on this call with you, Robert. That’s what you’re getting today. And we’ll look for more next time we meet.

Jeff Taylor: He’s definitely the better of the two. So it’s a funny thing. We were actually talking in Austin about how we might be able to mess with you a little bit, but we just don’t have to.

Robert Dutt: Good to know. And Craig, I’ll send you the audio clip of him saying you’re the better one for your performance review.

Craig Taylor: As long as that is your final edit, Rob, I’m happy.

Robert Dutt: Gentlemen, thank you for taking the time. It’s been a fun conversation and we covered a lot of ground very well. Thank you.

Jeff Taylor: Yeah, thank you, Robert.

Craig Taylor: Yeah, look forward to seeing you soon, Robert. Thank you.

Robert Dutt: There you have it. Jeff Taylor and Craig Taylor, both from Lenovo. I’d like to thank both Jeff and Craig for the time. It’s genuinely not that often you get the global and local perspective on the same conversation at the same time. And I thought the dynamic made for a richer discussion than either could have delivered on their own.

A few things were taken away from this one. The incentive consolidation is real and it’s significant. Going from 2,300 active global incentives down to about 200, a 92% reduction, while keeping the total investment pool intact. Meaningful simplification. Jeff’s pizza framing is a good one. Same amount of pizza, fewer slices, each one bigger and more impactful. Earning power stays, operational complexity goes. If your business has been navigating a patchwork of overlapping incentives, the cleaner path to earning should be welcome.

On the tier transition, Craig was direct that over 90% of Canadian partners either maintained or improved their status in the move to the new authorized gold and platinum structure. If you’re in the 10% that didn’t, the message was clear. Get in front of your Lenovo rep, build a joint business plan. There’s a path forward, but you have to start the conversation.

The services shift didn’t seem like a someday conversation. Lenovo’s targeting 15 to 20% of its partner revenues from services and solutions over the next one to two years. TruScale is available and more flexible than a lot of partners probably realize. The partners who are going to win here are the ones who can articulate their own services capabilities clearly, so Lenovo can align around them rather than compete with them.

On AI, I found Jeff’s forward-looking comments on agentic AI and the reimagination of enablement genuinely fascinating. Most partner portals are, as he said, static. They show you yesterday, not tomorrow. That is going to change. And how it changes will shape how partner programs actually function. Worth paying attention to across the industry.

And for the hardware volatility piece, Top Choice Express is the practical answer right now for partners trying to manage customer conversations when prices are moving before product ships. If you’re not comfortable with it already, your first call tomorrow should be with your Lenovo rep.

Oh, and yes, we did keep the clip of Jeff saying that Craig is the better Taylor. It’s in the edit. You’re welcome, Craig.

If you enjoyed this episode, please follow or subscribe to the podcast wherever you get your podcasts. We’re on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, most of the major directories. Ratings and reviews are always appreciated and genuinely do help the show find a wider audience in the Canadian channel community.

Until next time, I’m Robert Dutt for ChannelBuzz.ca and I’ll see you in the channel.

Welcome to The Buzz from ChannelBuzz.ca, I’m Robert Dutt, today is Friday, May 15, and here’s what’s happening in the channel today.

Hewlett Packard Enterprise announced a major shift in its distribution strategy yesterday, naming Ingram Micro and TD SYNNEX as its two global distributors. The move transitions HPE to a unified distribution model designed to deliver greater consistency and operational support for partners worldwide. According to the vendor, this structure will be anchored by these two global leaders but complemented by regional and specialist distributors to maximize partner capabilities. The change signals a streamlined approach to enablement, with HPE expecting the unified model to drive additional investments in partner resources across its full portfolio. This includes helping distributors build deeper expertise in high-demand areas like networking, cloud, and AI. For Canadian IT solution providers, a simplified global distribution tier could mean more predictable engagements, faster quoting, and improved access to cross-sell opportunities, particularly within the HPE Networking portfolio, as priorities evolve across different customer sizes and industries.

Managed services software provider N-able has expanded its executive leadership team, announcing the appointments of Robert Johnston as Chief Innovation Officer and Nicole Reineke as Chief AI Officer. The dual appointments highlight a strategic pivot toward embedding artificial intelligence and advanced automation directly into the company’s platform ecosystem. N-able noted the new roles are intended to reinforce the company’s focus on business resilience and innovation as IT providers face increasingly complex cyber and operational challenges. Designating a dedicated Chief AI Officer is a notable step in the MSP software space, signaling that AI is moving from a roadmap feature to a core architectural priority. IT solution providers running their practices on N-able can expect a more aggressive rollout of AI-driven capabilities designed to streamline technician workflows and improve automated threat response.

Data resilience vendor HYCU launched HYCU aiR yesterday, an AI-native solution that transforms backup data into actionable security and compliance intelligence. Rather than relying on point solutions for data security posture management or insider risk, aiR allows organizations to query their existing backup data across dozens of SaaS applications to identify sensitive data exposure, identity drift, and unmonitored AI agent activity. For managed service providers, this alters the backup conversation. Partners can use the platform to run rapid assessments across a prospect’s environment, identifying compliance exposures within days. According to the company, midmarket customers are often priced out of standalone security tools that cover a fraction of the estate. By reading backup data as a security intelligence layer across more than 100 workloads, partners can deliver overlapping intelligence as a natural extension of backup contracts, providing a tangible way to govern shadow AI and secure data pipelines.

In Brief – The Canadian Internet Registration Authority will unveil a new channel-based cybersecurity platform for MSPs at the ChannelNEXT event in Toronto later this month. Object First has launched a new cloud platform designed to help partners monitor and manage distributed data backups. Peripherals maker Plugable has expanded its B2B strategy with the appointment of Matthew Dargis as Chief Revenue Officer to build out a new field sales organization. Keeper Security has introduced its 2026 MSP Partner Program with a new tier-based discount structure tied to annualized global revenue. Montreal-based managed service provider MTech Cyber has released an assessment platform designed to help IT providers validate security protections for small business clients. Full details and links in the show notes or the blog post.

Later today on In The Channel, we’ll feature a conversation with Lenovo’s global partner ecosystem head Jeff Taylor and Canada channel chief Craig Taylor on the vendor’s massive incentive consolidation and the shift to services-led revenue.

And if you haven’t heard it yet, on yesterday’s episode of In The Channel, we sat down with ESET’s Cameron Tousley and Pedro Kertzman to discuss why cyber threat intelligence belongs in the MSP practice.

That’s how we’re seeing the headlines today. I’m Robert Dutt for ChannelBuzz.ca, thanks for listening. Have a great day.

Welcome to The Buzz from ChannelBuzz.ca, I’m Robert Dutt, today is Thursday, May 14, 2026, and here’s what’s happening in the channel today.

Acronis has launched Cyber Frame, a new hyperconverged infrastructure and infrastructure-as-a-service platform built specifically for managed service providers. The launch comes at a critical time for the channel, as many service providers are actively seeking alternatives to legacy virtualization platforms following recent industry shakeups and pricing model changes. Cyber Frame allows MSPs to build and deliver infrastructure services with native, seamless integration into Acronis’ existing cyber protection and remote monitoring and management tools. Rather than dealing with the unpredictable costs of hyperscale public clouds or the complexity of managing disparate vendor stacks, MSPs can use Cyber Frame to consolidate their service delivery. Acronis says the platform is designed to give service providers significantly better margin control and simplified management. It offers flexible deployment options, allowing partners to choose between a fully hosted model managed by Acronis, or a partner-hosted deployment running on the MSP’s own hardware in their local data center. By combining compute, storage, networking, and security into a single unified platform, Acronis is positioning Cyber Frame as a way for MSPs to scale their infrastructure offerings profitably while maintaining the tight security posture that modern SMB clients demand.

Citrix has introduced Citrix Platform Flex, a new persona-based secure access model intended to help organizations move away from static, one-size-fits-all IT delivery. In today’s hybrid work environment, the access requirements for a call center employee, a traveling executive, and a remote software engineer are vastly different. Citrix built Platform Flex to recognize these distinctions, allowing IT teams to align resources, security controls, and application delivery specifically to the varying needs of different worker profiles. The new platform delivers secure application access, managed services, and comprehensive observability under a model designed for more flexible and predictable pricing. By shifting away from rigid licensing structures that often force companies to over-provision resources for basic users, Citrix aims to help enterprises optimize their cloud and infrastructure spending. Platform Flex also incorporates advanced analytics and security policies that adapt in real-time based on user behavior and location. For channel partners, this persona-driven approach provides a clear framework to help enterprise customers rationalize their IT investments, simplify the management of distributed workforces, and ensure that security protocols do not impede productivity for end users who require high-performance access to specialized applications.

Upwind has launched its new AI Agentic Pack, adding autonomous, agent-driven capabilities to its cloud security platform. As cloud environments grow increasingly complex and security operations centers face unprecedented alert fatigue, the cybersecurity industry is rapidly shifting toward agentic AI to help manage the load. Upwind’s new tools are specifically designed to help security teams autonomously investigate threats, validate whether theoretical vulnerabilities are actually exposed to active exploitation, and prioritize remediation efforts based on real-world risk. Instead of simply generating more alerts for human analysts to sift through, the Agentic Pack leverages artificial intelligence to actively investigate the root cause of an incident, map the attack path across cloud infrastructure, and propose actionable fixes. This launch leans heavily into the growing necessity of using autonomous agents to drastically compress the window between threat discovery and response. With malicious actors utilizing AI to accelerate their attacks, defenders require matching speed to counter them. For managed security service providers, Upwind’s agentic capabilities offer a pathway to scale their operations, handle a higher volume of telemetry without adding headcount, and provide faster threat containment for their clients.

In brief:

Nerdio vice president of MSP sales Will Ominsky warned in a Redmond Channel Partner interview today that MSPs who figure out how to monetize AI by the end of 2026 will grab massive market share. 

Boomi and Red Hat have announced a strategic collaboration to deliver an integrated stack for deploying agentic AI at scale. 

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security is reportedly scrutinizing Instructure after a massive ransomware attack disrupted its Canvas online learning platform. 

And Canadian cybersecurity provider Plurilock has announced 1.13 million dollars in new critical services contracts. 

Later today on in the channel, we’re talking eCrime Reports and Threat Intelligence with Camerous Tousley and Pedro Kertzman of ESET.

And if you missed it yesterday, check out my conversation with Auvik’s Steve Petryschuk on the gap between MSPs’ expectation around AI, and the reality they have realized to date.

That’s how we’re seeing the headlines today. I’m Robert Dutt for ChannelBuzz.ca, thanks for listening. Have a great day.

Robert Dutt: Hello and welcome to In The Channel from ChannelBuzz.ca, bringing news and information to the Canadian IT channel community for the last sixteen years. I’m Robert Dutt, editor of ChannelBuzz.ca, and your host for the show.

Every year we look to the major vendor reports to see where the industry’s head is at, but Auvik’s 2026 IT Trends Report, titled “Beyond the Hype,” feels a little different this time around. It’s a bit of a reality check for the AI era. We’ve been hearing about the AI revolution for some time now, but Auvik’s data shows a massive gap between what leadership thinks is happening and what’s actually hitting the help desk.

We’re talking about a world where 76% of executives swear they have an AI policy, while more than half of their frontline staff have never even seen it. That disconnect isn’t just a communications problem. For an MSP, it’s a massive opening for shadow AI to walk in through the front door.

To dig into this maturity mirage and what it means for your service desk – and your bottom line – I’m joined today by Steve Petryschuk. Steve is vice president of product and market strategy at Auvik, and he’s been at the center of translating this data into a roadmap for partners. We talk about why documentation is actually the most important AI tool, the rising risk of competency debt in junior techs, and why the Canadian mid-market might actually have an execution advantage over the big enterprise players.

Let’s get right into it. My chat with Steve Petryschuk.

[MUSIC]

Robert Dutt: Steve, thanks for taking the time. I appreciate it.

Steve Petryschuk: Thanks so much for having me.

Robert Dutt: The report highlights a significant gap in AI policy awareness – something we’re seeing across multiple industry reports. In this case, 76% of leaders believe they have a solid AI policy in place, while only 42% of frontline staff agree that policy even exists. Is that a communication failure, or is the policy just not mapping to how people are actually doing the work?

Steve Petryschuk: I think it’s a bit of both. I’d start with communication failure as the primary driver. We don’t always have visibility into when policy violations are occurring, so how do you enforce that policy – or even communicate that enforcement – without that visibility? It starts with just making sure people know the policy exists, and then building some implementation around enforcement.

Robert Dutt: Only 5% of respondents say AI is core to their operations today, despite plenty of optimism in the data. What are the specific readiness hurdles keeping AI in the pilot phase for so many MSPs?

Steve Petryschuk: This is probably one of the most interesting findings in the report – that disconnect between enthusiasm around AI and how little has actually been operationalized. I think it starts with trust. Most MSPs don’t yet have the trust to let AI operate solo, and that makes sense, because we’re the ones managing the client relationships and the consequences when things go wrong. Until we build that trust, we’ll remain at that pilot stage.

So I see it as a phased approach. You start in areas where humans remain in the loop – at least for now – so you can build comfort with the system. But equally important is ensuring you’re giving AI good inputs, because this is still very much a garbage-in, garbage-out situation. If your inputs aren’t clean, your outputs won’t be either, and that’ll hold you back from ever making AI a core part of operations.

Robert Dutt: Does the fact that most tools MSPs are using today are either adding AI functionality or on the roadmap to do so – does that help build that trust, or does it require something more fundamental?

Steve Petryschuk: There are a lot of vendors adding AI on top of their tools, but I think the more useful question is: how do you embed AI into the existing workflows your team is already using? Rather than treating it as a bolt-on, think about the processes you’re already familiar with – can AI assist you within those workflows and demonstrate value day to day? That’s how you start to build trust incrementally. Once you see it working in familiar territory, you can expand from there.

Robert Dutt: And as you build that trust – once you’ve got those first steps working the way you want – how does an MSP move from having an AI policy on paper to implementing the technical controls a client or auditor can actually verify?

Steve Petryschuk: It starts with visibility. Before you can enforce a policy, you need to uncover all the AI tools in the environment – both sanctioned and shadow. As shadow IT has evolved into shadow AI, that discovery step is critical. From there, you can move toward real-time policy reminders before committing to more active, automated guardrails. Eventually, you get to a point where you’re blocking non-sanctioned AI tools and allowing sanctioned ones. Most MSPs I talk to are still a long way from that, but they’re at least starting with the visibility angle – and that’s the right starting point.

Robert Dutt: On that topic, Auvik’s telemetry found over 100,000 shadow AI applications in customer networks last year. Is shadow AI replacing shadow IT as the primary risk, or is it effectively the same problem in a new form?

Steve Petryschuk: It’s a problem that’s evolved. Shadow IT and shadow AI are directly related, but you can’t just do a find-and-replace on the terminology – the risks aren’t identical. A lot of the core concerns are the same: understanding what applications are in use, where data is going, what’s being ingested. But the business impact of shadow AI gone wrong is significantly higher. Think about LLMs being trained on data you didn’t know was out there, or agents with access to multiple systems inadvertently moving sensitive client data – or worse, surfacing Client A’s data in a report for Client B. The risks aren’t entirely new, but the consequences of something going wrong are considerably greater.

Robert Dutt: That’s an interesting angle – it’s not just that the data is out there, but that it can be actively executed against you. The accidental cross-contamination between clients is a particularly pointed example for MSPs.

The report also found that around 60% of IT teams discover unauthorized SaaS at least monthly. From a visibility standpoint, does this signal that the perimeter approach is effectively dead? And if so, what does a modern visibility strategy look like for an MSP managing, say, 50 clients?

Steve Petryschuk: The traditional perimeter has been eroding for a while. Work happens at the endpoint now, and that’s where visibility needs to focus – continuous discovery of the applications end users are running day to day. It doesn’t mean you’re auditing every minute of every day, but it’s not a point-in-time snapshot either. It’s an ongoing picture that gives you something useful whether you’re responding to a support ticket or walking a client through a QBR – “here’s all the shadow AI we’ve uncovered.” That discovery needs to happen as close to where work is actually getting done as possible: within the applications being used, and on the endpoints where people are working.

Robert Dutt: Interestingly, despite all the shadow AI conversation, MSPs in the report still ranked shadow IT as the number one underestimated risk. Why do you think business leaders continue to miss the gravity of it, even as sensitive data flows into AI tools?

Steve Petryschuk: I think it’s one of those areas where it’s easier to turn a blind eye until there’s a triggering security incident. Until something actually happens to you, it’s always someone else’s problem. You hear about it, you read about it, but “it’s not going to happen here.” The honest version of that is: it hasn’t happened here yet. And until you’ve had that personal experience where shadow IT – or shadow AI – bites you, the tendency is to underestimate the risk.

Robert Dutt: There’s an interesting budget paradox in the data – almost half of IT teams said their budgets were growing, but a similar proportion cited lack of time as their biggest blocker. Where’s the money going if it’s not buying back time for staff?

Steve Petryschuk: It’s a great question, and the report didn’t specifically dig into the causes of that disconnect. But based on conversations with partners and broader industry trends, I think a lot of those budget increases are simply going to maintain the status quo – salary increases, rising tooling costs, price increases still catching up from the inflation cycle of a couple of years ago. The budgets are growing, but that growth is being absorbed by keeping the lights on: keeping the tools running, keeping the teams intact. The magnitude of the increases isn’t enough to fundamentally change how work gets done, and without changing how you work, you won’t get that time back.

Robert Dutt: Here’s one where MSPs can take a bit of a victory lap – corporate IT teams are apparently half as likely to be making new investments compared to MSPs. Does that suggest the managed services model is structurally better at converting budget into operational progress, or is this more of a “you have to automate to survive” story?

Steve Petryschuk: Part of it is the MSP’s willingness to adapt and experiment – we tend to be a little ahead of the curve on new technology adoption. But I also think it’s a macroeconomic confidence indicator. Historically, MSPs tend to hold up better – and even do well – in times of broader economic uncertainty. So when there’s turbulence around them, MSPs are more likely to say, “We’ve seen this before, we’ll be okay,” and that confidence translates into a willingness to make new investments even when others are pulling back.

Robert Dutt: And there’s something to be said for the maturity of the managed services model at this point – you can look at a rough environment, recognize the pattern, and not panic.

Steve Petryschuk: That’s exactly right.

Robert Dutt: The report found that just over 50% of IT teams are still spending ten or more hours a week on basic user tickets. What role do you see AI playing in actually moving that needle – going from hyped solution to genuinely freeing up technician time?

Steve Petryschuk: Let’s set aside the panacea of fully automated ticket resolution for now – the scenario where a ticket comes in and no one ever touches it. Maybe we get there eventually, and for simple things like password resets, some level of automation is already feasible. But the more realistic near-term win is using AI to gather all the context a technician would normally have to collect manually. Agents can pull together that background information and surface a recommended next action, so that by the time a technician picks up the ticket, their job is less “figure out what to do” and more “confirm this is the right call and execute.” That’s an easier step, it’s probably already happening in some service desks today, and it starts to build trust in AI recommendations over time – which feeds back into that adoption flywheel we talked about earlier.

Robert Dutt: And as those recommendations get better, you get more comfortable with the idea that yes, that’s the right answer for this type of issue – and eventually that trust extends further.

Steve Petryschuk: Exactly.

Robert Dutt: On the workforce side, the report showed a hollowing out of the hybrid model in favour of office-first or remote-first. From a network management perspective, does office-first actually make IT any simpler, or is distributed support just the permanent baseline now?

Steve Petryschuk: I think distributed support is the permanent baseline. For MSPs, it doesn’t really matter whether the client is in the office or working from home – we’re still supporting them remotely either way. Network complexity doesn’t change much. And even in a fully return-to-office environment, users are still moving around, travelling to events, going on the road.

Looking at the Canadian context specifically – we’re still laggards in the office-first shift compared to some of our global peers, despite what you hear in the media. There’s still a significant amount of distributed work happening here, and I think the problem of managing that distributed environment is a long way from going away.

Robert Dutt: You’ve framed AI as a “senior IT associate in your pocket” for junior techs – which is a much more interesting way to look at it than “it’s going to eliminate entry-level jobs.” But even with that framing, is there still a risk of competency debt? Where the next generation of technicians ends up leaning so heavily on AI diagnostics that they lose the ability to evaluate whether the recommended action is actually right?

Steve Petryschuk: The risk is absolutely there. But it’s not entirely a new problem – technology has always built on previous technology, and skills evolve accordingly. How many technicians today can troubleshoot at the processor level? Not many. The craft changes.

What matters is teaching junior technicians the right fundamentals for the AI era: basic problem-solving skills, the ability to recognize a plausible answer from an implausible one, and how to use AI tooling effectively. The actual knowledge base evolves, but you still need a baseline of IT competency to function well. And that pipeline from junior to senior really matters – if we hollow out the junior tier, we’ll eventually run out of senior technicians too.

Robert Dutt: Since we’re both flying the Maple Leaf – did you see anything specifically Canadian in the data? Anything unique or peculiar to the Canadian market?

Steve Petryschuk: The survey data doesn’t specifically break out geographies, but based on conversations with MSPs across Canada, the US, and Europe, I don’t think we’re significantly ahead or behind on AI adoption – we’re facing many of the same governance challenges. Policies aren’t always making it to day-to-day operations, and visibility into which AI tools are actually in use remains a challenge for most.

Where I do see a Canadian distinction is in the regulatory and legal landscape. I was recently at an event for professional engineers in Ontario where AI regulation came up – and the picture is interesting. The EU is taking an aggressive regulatory stance; the US is moving toward a more relaxed one. Canada, unsurprisingly, is finding its way somewhere in the middle. That’s probably the most Canadian answer I can give.

Robert Dutt: Hopefully the middle ground lands well. Last question – looking at all the data, if an MSP owner can only fix one thing in their operations this year, what yields the biggest ROI?

Steve Petryschuk: Documentation. You need an up-to-date source of truth, because that’s what AI has to build on to operate effectively in your environment. Visibility actually improves when documentation improves – they’re closely related. But if you don’t have a solid, well-maintained source of truth, you’re going to get that garbage-in, garbage-out scenario no matter how good the AI tools are. So if there’s one thing to focus on, it’s making sure you know what your sources of truth are, and that they’re accurate and up to date. That gives you the foundation everything else builds on.

Robert Dutt: I appreciate that bit of advice. Steve, thank you for taking the time and walking us through the numbers.

Steve Petryschuk: Thanks so much for having me on.

[MUSIC]

Robert Dutt: There you have it – Steve Petryschuk from Auvik. I’d like to thank Steve for his time. And honestly, I think “AI as a senior associate in your pocket” is going to be the quote of the month.

The big takeaway for me is that we need to stop thinking about AI as a cool project and start treating it as a documentation problem. If your source of truth is a mess, your AI is just going to be a very fast, very confident hallucination machine.

For those of you running MSPs in Canada, the maturity mirage is your best sales tool right now. If you can show your client that their budget increase is being swallowed by reactive noise because they don’t have visibility, you’ve moved from being a vendor to being a business advisor.

Thanks for spending some time with us today. If you found this conversation useful, you can find more in the full show notes at ChannelBuzz.ca. You can find the podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, and pretty much everywhere you get your audio. If you have a moment, leaving a rating or review really does help us reach more of the community.

Until next time, I’m Robert Dutt for ChannelBuzz.ca, and I’ll see you in the channel.

Welcome to The Buzz from ChannelBuzz.ca, I’m Robert Dutt, today is Wednesday, May 13, 2026, and here’s what’s happening in the channel today.

SonicWall yesterday announced the NSv XS, a new virtual firewall extending its Gen 8 platform to cloud environments, with managed service providers and MSSPs as the primary target. The product allows partners to deploy firewall security wherever customer workloads run – public cloud, private cloud, branch offices, and distributed infrastructure – under a management model designed for multi-tenant operations. According to SonicWall, the NSv XS carries the same Gen 8 security engine found in its physical appliances into a lightweight virtual form factor, which the company says closes a growing gap as customer environments increasingly span both physical and cloud boundaries that legacy appliances can’t follow. The announcement is a practical one for the channel: a cloud-native firewall with the Gen 8 engine that can be managed centrally simplifies both the sales conversation around security coverage and the operational overhead of delivering it across heterogeneous customer environments.

Also yesterday, Huntress announced a partnership with insurance firm Acrisure to connect cybersecurity posture directly to cyber insurance outcomes for eligible organizations. Under the program, customers running the Huntress managed security platform can access Cyber and Tech Errors and Omissions policies through Acrisure with no deductible – with policy terms tied to the customer’s verified security posture rather than a generic underwriting baseline. According to Huntress, the program is built on the premise that organizations that have actually deployed layered security controls should not be underwritten at the same rates as those that haven’t. The arrangement is worth watching for solution providers who have been looking for cyber insurance integrations that go beyond co-marketing – this one appears to operationalize the connection between managed security delivery and insurance terms in a way that could strengthen both the MSP’s value proposition and the client’s risk profile.

Intruder rounded out a busy Tuesday by releasing its 2026 Attack Surface Management Index, drawing on anonymized data from 3,000 organizations to assess how quickly companies are identifying and closing their exposed attack surfaces. The headline finding: more than one in four organizations still have MySQL databases exposed and accessible from the internet – a foundational configuration risk that the report says reflects a broader struggle to maintain visibility over sprawling and distributed infrastructure. According to Intruder, the data shows that human remediation is falling further behind the pace of automated exploitation, a trend the company calls the “Mythos Era” – a period in which attacker tooling has measurably outpaced defender workflows. The report gives solution providers a concrete, data-backed framework to bring into client conversations, particularly for customers still relying on point-in-time scanning rather than continuous monitoring.

In Brief – 

ThreatDown yesterday launched an identity threat detection and response platform, extending its security stack to cover credential-based attacks across Microsoft Entra ID, Okta, and Active Directory. 

Cycode is declaring “shift left is dead,” releasing new agentic development lifecycle security capabilities designed to protect AI-driven software pipelines from code generation through deployment. 

Toronto-based AYCE Capital yesterday announced the acquisition of a cybersecurity advisory firm to anchor a portfolio-wide security center of excellence. 

MSPAlliance last week added Service Lines to its Cyber Verify platform, letting MSPs map audited controls directly to the services they deliver for cleaner, client-ready compliance reporting. 

Full details and links in the show notes or the blog post.

Later today on In The Channel, we’re sitting down with Steve Petryschuk from Auvik to dig into their 2026 IT Trends Report and what the data reveals about the gap between AI ambition and AI maturity in managed services.

And if you haven’t heard it yet, yesterday’s episode is a good one – Joel Abramson from Top Down Ventures joins me to discuss the close of their C$38 million MSP-focused founders fund and why they believe managed service providers are the primary delivery vehicle for AI to the small and mid-market.

That’s how we’re seeing the headlines today. I’m Robert Dutt for ChannelBuzz.ca, thanks for listening. Have a great day.

Robert Dutt: Hello and welcome to In The Channel from ChannelBuzz.ca, bringing news and information to the Canadian IT channel community for the last sixteen years. I’m Robert Dutt, editor of ChannelBuzz.ca and your host for the show.

If you caught The Buzz this morning – and you really should have – you already know the headline. Vancouver-based Top Down Ventures has closed Founders Fund I at $38 million Canadian, oversubscribed, as the first institutional venture fund focused exclusively on early-stage software and AI for the managed service provider ecosystem.

The story behind it, though, is rich. Top Down was founded with three partners with deep roots in the Canadian channel community: Chris Day of IT Glue and ScalePad, Mark Scott who founded N-able, and today’s guest, Joel Abramson, who ran Fully Managed through more than a dozen acquisitions before its $137 million sale to Telus Business Solutions in 2021.

The fund already has its first exit in the books. zofiQ, an agentic AI platform for MSP service desks that ConnectWise acquired just six months after Top Down’s investment, at 5.3 times the invested capital.

Joel joined me this morning to talk about why MSP software needs its own dedicated venture fund, what the first exit tells us about where agentic AI is headed, and one market shift that has the team genuinely excited about the decade ahead.

Let’s get right into it. My chat with Joel Abramson.

Joel, thanks for taking the time. I appreciate it.

Joel Abramson: Great to be here, Rob.

Robert Dutt: I wanted to start with the origin story here. I think it’s an interesting one in that you had a big role in building and running Fully Managed through a dozen or so acquisitions, then sold – instead of going off and retiring on a boat somewhere or that sort of thing, you ended up in venture investing in specifically MSP software. Can you walk me through how that happened? How did Top Down come together? Was this something that you sought out or something that Chris Day pulled you into? How did that happen?

Joel Abramson: Yeah, well, let’s be clear – I do love being on boats.

To tell the origin story, you get to go through a 25-year journey of the MSP ecosystem itself, because there are three general partners: Mark Scott, Chris Day, and myself, Joel Abramson. Our journey dates back to the early 2000s when Mark Scott started N-able, and he was one of the pioneers that really helped value-added resellers and break-fix IT service providers become MSPs.

I meet people every time I’m out on the road who have a story about working with N-able – transitioning their revenue model from break-fix to recurring. N-able is a phenomenal company today and I think Mark’s legacy lives on there.

Mark started that company and then exited just before the SolarWinds acquisition. Then he went on to start a service provider called CareWorks – an MSP focused on senior care facilities. A really interesting vertical, as well as broad SMB.

But I’ll pause his story and focus on Chris, because Chris is founder and chairman and really sets the vision for Top Down. Chris had an MSP as well back in the early 2000s. Eventually that was Fully Managed, and that’s where I joined him. I had a small – much less successful – MSP called Packetsafe Networks, and I rolled my little MSP into Chris’s marquee MSP, Fully Managed, and together we set on this journey.

We wanted to bring that company to ten cities with $10 million in revenue in each city and then sell it to a Canadian telco – and it’s not revisionist history, it was actually the goal.

But then a couple of years into our shared journey at Fully Managed, Chris got pulled into building software. It was because I’d built a bunch of software for Fully Managed to run on, and he made the mistake – or the fortuitous opportunity – of showing it to his peer group. His peer group was like, “I want to use that.” So he said, “Okay, well, I’ll build it for you.” He started building a documentation platform from the ground up and called it IT Glue, and that was a phenomenal ride for him – taking it from a couple of peer group mates trying it out to selling to Kaseya in 2018 and building a very large company in a relatively short amount of time. Not without a tremendous amount of hard work and grind. He was on the road with pop-up banners signing up logo by logo by logo in the early days, but eventually the movement just took shape and every MSP realized that they needed a documentation platform, and IT Glue took off.

So IT Glue exits to Kaseya in 2018. Chris has to make that decision: do I want to golf and travel for the rest of my life, or what brings me joy? And so he actually started Top Down as a way to re-engage back with the MSP community. He had an early portfolio of three companies: Warranty Master, a company he had started with his brother; Backup Radar; and Quoter. Together those three early companies started to grow at their own individual pace.

Keep in mind, we’re still running Fully Managed over here – I’m running it for him. Then we ended up putting Fully Managed together with Mark Scott’s MSP, and that’s how the three of us came together.

Then yes, we did a number of acquisitions. We grew Fully Managed to be $100 million in revenue. It wasn’t the straight line Chris and I had talked about – ten cities in ten years – but it was maybe seven cities. The bridge version: Telus came in and said they wanted to acquire Canada’s largest MSP, which was Fully Managed at the time. They had done a bunch of research and nine months later we consummated that transaction, at the end of 2021.

I’d been working with Chris for a number of years on the early-stage portfolio, because we’d get a couple of calls every month with people saying, “Hey, I’m starting this project, Chris, are you interested in taking a look?” So we started to build this reputation as investors in early-stage MSP software companies. We tried some other stuff – everything from consumer packaged goods (we still have a couple of investments) to starting a country music label, which we’ll save for another time. But we always knew our home, I think, was in the MSP space.

After the Fully Managed exit, we decided we wanted to really compound our impact. We had this idea of a venture fund – and maybe I’ll pause there, because I can continue the journey, but we’ll wait and see if you have any questions up to that point.

Robert Dutt: Understandable. It’s a wild journey, and it really is back to the heart of the early days of the MSP movement – as you say, from break-fix and VAR models. I guess tell me a little bit about where you’re at now. The fund is positioned as the first institutional VC targeting early-stage software and AI for this ecosystem. Why do you think this space needs a dedicated fund? What does a generalist venture fund miss or get wrong when they’re looking at the space?

Joel Abramson: We’ve been doing early-stage investing for a few years – five years. At the same time, Warranty Master became ScalePad, and ScalePad started to gain really, really great momentum. ScalePad brought in a growth equity partner, Integrity Growth Partners, who are just phenomenal folks. They capitalized the business and that grew ScalePad from $10 million to $50 million. They were great partners, great board members, and we watched these guys – we were like, wow, we’ve been through this journey a couple of times. They add a lot of value, and we’re really excited about that relationship.

We were doing our thing with the early-stage companies, and so we looked across the ecosystem. We said, there is a ton of capital that’s ready to invest in companies in the MSP ecosystem when they get to a certain scale – that was kind of the scale that ScalePad had gotten to. Then we looked down and said, well, what about the guys that are just starting out? There’s not a ton of support. There’s a ConnectWise pitch contest that grants $60,000 or $70,000 to early-stage companies. And there are early-stage investors – we’ve seen companies like Pax8 and Huntress go through many rounds of financing and they started somewhere. But we saw that the strongest source of capital in the MSP ecosystem was actually coming from angel investors. It was Joe Paniterri and Kevin Blake and Channel Angels, and they had done a number of deals, bringing together really early-stage capital and putting $100,000 into a business fueled from a number of different folks. That’s really, really cool. But where’s all the venture?

You look across horizontal software and there are funds of venture that just pour in. In the big markets – the Valley and New York – and then in secondary markets, there are funds focused on those areas. But we saw early-stage MSP software companies as vastly overlooked.

So we said, what if we could bring together capital from the MSP ecosystem? Because we’ve made plenty of millionaires just by acquiring them with Fully Managed. You look at how that scales out across the ecosystem: you’ve got Evergreen and Integris and Thrive and all these folks buying up MSPs. The stats are over 200 search funds, family offices, and MSP aggregators buying MSPs right now. That’s generating a lot of wealth for a lot of people. Then you have MSPs that are super profitable and people are making good cash flow. Then you have all the software companies that have exited with similar stories to Chris’s. There’s actually quite a bit of capital that could be put to work back into the ecosystem if we just found a way to harness it and focus it on innovation.

We said, instead of doing a couple of deals a year, what if we could make 8 to 10 investments a year by bringing capital together? And then what if we could build a system around that to take everything we’ve learned working with early-stage companies – applying those practices, bringing folks together for design partners, early customers, advice, and partnerships in the MSP ecosystem?

So we set out to raise a $25 million venture fund, and we said we were going to focus on educating the MSP ecosystem on what investing in a venture fund looks like, because it’s really just going to fuel innovation for MSPs themselves. Our goal was to have half the fund raised from the MSP community and half from outside – similar to what it was at Fully Managed: let’s tell the world about what a great opportunity exists in MSP.

We were super successful in the first bucket. We got really well received by the MSP community. We have over 100 LPs in the fund and we exceeded our target of $25 million. In the second bucket, we still have a lot of work to do. We’re one year into our Outliers podcast, we’ve produced one white paper, and we’ve had hundreds and hundreds of conversations in the institutional community, educating funds of funds and family offices on the opportunity for early-stage MSP software investing. We only got a couple of participants in this fund – which is all right, because it shows the strength of the MSP ecosystem. We still oversubscribed our target. But we’re excited to continue that journey of educating institutional investors for our second fund and beyond.

Robert Dutt: You mentioned you’re in at the early stage. Where in the lifecycle do you typically start looking, and what does a target portfolio company look like at the point you’re getting involved?

Joel Abramson: I’ve only been doing this for a few years, so I’m still learning some of the language, Rob. But we talk about early stage being right at inception – which is called pre-seed, the first money into a company. Maybe they have an idea of what they want to build, a prototype, a business plan, some people, but they haven’t actually started that path to launch – all the way up to around that first million or million and a half of revenue, where they’d be called a late-seed investment or an early Series A. So maybe it’s the second money in, or in a Series A it could be the third. But really we’re focused on the early stage where we can leverage the strength of our LP base – a lot of strong MSPs – as well as the strength of the community that Top Down works to enable and bring together.

That can be for design partners, early customers, folks to help with advice, and then partnerships in the MSP ecosystem. Maybe a company is working with ScalePad to solve a problem and ScalePad can help by bringing that product to its customer base. It’s really about building the things that matter most to MSPs.

And that’s why I think we love this ecosystem so much – it’s a partnership of vendors and service providers. If we look forward to how AI is going to impact things, you have small and medium businesses at the frontline – all the enablement use cases there, all the cybersecurity use cases. Then you have the service provider layer, which is MSPs helping them with all those things. Then you have a middle layer of supply chain software like the companies we invest in. And on top of that, you have the hyperscalers, the cloud companies, the frontier companies. That four-tiered system really matters, because without the innovation from Microsoft and Anthropic, the macro doesn’t move forward. But very rarely is it going to go straight from there into frontline workers’ hands. The two layers in between – the layer we invest in, and the MSPs themselves – are really what’s helping bring the value from the top to the end market.

We think it’s an incredibly resilient ecosystem. We think there’s nobody better positioned to help with AI transformation than MSPs. And that layer between the frontier companies and the hyperscalers and the MSPs is really important – that’s where innovation happens on their behalf, and that’s the kind of companies we’re investing in.

Robert Dutt: One example of that would be zofiQ, which I think was your first exit – and some pretty startling numbers there: a six-month turnaround, selling to ConnectWise, bringing back more than 5x what you put in. What did you see in that company that made you say “we’re in,” and what did the ConnectWise acquisition tell you about the market for PSA and agentic AI and where that’s all headed?

Joel Abramson: It starts with Lee and his team. We get the fortunate opportunity to look at a lot of things that are being built and we’re still learning, trying to keep pace. As the last couple of years have played out, we’ve been students of what people are building and how they’re looking at solving problems, armed with the knowledge of the last 25 years of the ecosystem.

When we met Lee, we were really impressed with him as a founder. He had a strong track record of purpose-building solutions. When Chris and I sat down with him, it was obvious he was solving singular problems with a tremendous amount of depth, versus some of the other folks we’d seen building solutions who were really going an inch deep and a mile wide. Knowing how mission-critical these solutions are to MSPs – that for every time they mess up a service ticket, they put that customer relationship at risk – we knew that Lee’s approach was just bang on. He was obsessed with solving singular use cases. It showed in the team he put together, the technology he built, and what customers were saying about the product.

It’s very atypical to make an investment and then six months later have it acquired. When it was all going down and we were talking to the ConnectWise folks, it was bittersweet. We’re so happy to see ConnectWise gain this incredible capability, but we were sad to know we weren’t going to have Lee in the Top Down portfolio anymore.

Ultimately, thrilled – because what it means for ConnectWise is that they can get this really powerful technology into a lot of people’s hands. That has a tremendous impact for the ecosystem, the end market, the MSPs partnered with ConnectWise. They can get this great innovative technology out into the market much faster than Lee could on his own, just going out and telling the story and waiting for the momentum to build. Thrilled for ConnectWise, thrilled for Lee and the team to jump into an organization like ConnectWise. And proud that we were able to play a tiny part on that journey.

Robert Dutt: zofiQ was automating the service desk with AI agents. From what you saw inside that experience with them, and looking across the portfolio now, I’m curious – especially given your background running an MSP – when you’re talking to MSPs about what some of these companies are doing, how ready are they to adopt and operationalize this kind of agentic tooling? Both in terms of willingness and interest, which I’m sure is high, and actual aptitude and ability to make the operational changes that come with it?

Joel Abramson: It totally depends on the MSP’s maturity. I’ve been through the life cycle of MSP maturity many times – two steps forward, one step back, a bunch of times. Every MSP is on a similar treadmill of growing and maturing, then having to embrace new technology, then getting hit by outside factors: whether it’s COVID, the move to remote work, the push back to the office, or the change in technology. It’s not a static industry, but it is an industrial-strength ecosystem because it’s so mission-critical for the customers MSPs serve.

Everybody is at their own part of the journey. Companies like zofiQ come around and they focus on building the right technology, then working with the ideal MSPs that are at a place where they can embrace it.

I go back to an inspirational investor, Dave Lahn, who always talks about the different buckets of work: the hero work, all the work that supports the hero work, and then all the work that should be done but isn’t. I think about MSPs with that third bucket. As a 20-year MSP operator, there were all these things I knew I wanted to do but could never get around to because we were always fighting fires, then trying to do proactive work, then project work – it compounds and you never had enough hands for the work that should be done that isn’t.

I think that’s one of the huge opportunities with AI – actually getting that work done, staying on top of it, and providing more stable, secure environments for MSP customers. If AI is the great enabler for MSPs themselves, then how exciting is it to be in a position where I can’t think of a service provider that supports small and medium businesses that’s better positioned to bring AI enablement down to that market than an MSP. I doubt it’s the accountant, I doubt it’s the janitor or the maintenance people. I think it’s the MSP, because you’re already talking technology.

As MSPs continue to evolve from the server room to boardroom conversations, AI is an incredible hook to get into that conversation. That’s why the work ScalePad does around customer success and supporting the strategy conversations is so critical. But the next wave of companies we see are really around helping MSPs actually deliver AI use cases successfully to their customers. That transformation will take place for a long, long time.

Robert Dutt: Your base of limited partners includes more than 100 MSP operators, including Pax8. That’s unusual for a VC fund. Was that a deliberate choice? And how does having operators as limited partners actually change how you source and evaluate deals?

Joel Abramson: It just makes us so strong. We have the brainpower of over 100 people there for us to tap and leverage. At our Horizons event in November – where we bring all of our LPs together – I’ve never seen a more aligned group of individuals, focused on supporting the supply chain of an ecosystem, come together and have meaningful conversations without any real individual agenda.

We think about it as a flywheel. We have a group of limited partners with all of our capital in this fund together. Of course we all want to make money – but I think what drives that outcome is supporting innovation and figuring out exactly where the best place to put capital is today that can have the largest impact tomorrow.

zofiQ is a perfect example. Here’s a strong founder with a huge problem, solving it at the deepest level, that MSPs are going to be able to take forward and dramatically impact their businesses and their customer experience. That, to me, is the genesis of venture investing: aligning all those things and putting the right pieces together.

We think about the strength of the mindshare of our LPs, figuring out ways to connect them with our portfolio companies, ways to validate our thesis and investments by harnessing that energy, and then making the right investments and providing the right support throughout a portfolio company’s lifecycle, thanks to that really, really strong LP base.

Robert Dutt: So if I’m an MSP owner listening to this – not an investor per se, just someone running a managed services shop – why should I be paying attention to what you guys are doing and what you’re funding? What’s the typical practical downstream impact on my business?

Joel Abramson: You could look at our portfolio with a degree of confidence that these companies are getting great support to build great products, that they’re talking to top MSP operators around the world to help shape what gets built. The average MSP is the benefactor of that, because it means they’re getting great product built that they can use in their MSP or deploy to their customers.

We’re doing this to earn and keep the reputation that a Top Down-backed company means tier-one innovation, great people behind it, that it’s been validated and tested – and that MSPs themselves can be the benefactor of that by leveraging this technology.

Robert Dutt: You closed this fund at about $38 million, oversubscribed, in what you called a slog of an environment – and I get that. What does that tell you about where institutional capital is actually flowing in 2026? And what does a successful Fund I set up for Fund II?

Joel Abramson: A lot of institutional capital is flowing towards the frontier companies and the supply chain of AI. We think that’s great, because just like the Microsofts and Googles that have powered the ecosystem for the last ten years, we think heavily capitalized AI companies are fantastic for the downstream companies – the software companies we’re investing in, the AI companies we’re investing in, the MSPs themselves, and the SMB layer. Capital flows down as well.

As vertical-focused funds like ours demonstrate a strong track record, more institutional capital will flow into vehicles like ours. Certainly a lot of capital is tied up at the top right now, but we see that as a great thing because we’re not super concerned about the capital cycles of the next three months. We’re much more concerned about the capital cycles of the next two decades.

As we’ve mobilized a non-insignificant pool of capital to support early-stage MSP software companies, we strive to earn the right to have a second fund with a more diverse group of participants, and subsequent funds beyond that – as long as we continue to find the right companies to partner with and add value along the way.

Robert Dutt: And that seems like – just with the names you’ve mentioned and the names I can think of off the top of my head – a target-rich environment. There are lots of companies building specifically for the MSP market for obvious reasons. But I’m curious: without necessarily naming names or tipping your hand, what problem or product category are you most excited about in the MSP software pipeline right now? Where’s the white space that’s still underbuilt?

Joel Abramson: In our research paper, we talk about two big macro things happening in the market right now.

One: we think this market – let’s broaden it to IT services, not just MSP – is going from a $600 billion addressable market to a $1.3 trillion addressable market, certainly $1 trillion by 2030. That’s a huge market. On the MSP side specifically, we have four or five scaled companies at or above a billion in revenue. Ninja is on its way up there. N-able, of course, is a big company. But you’re talking about a much larger addressable market – there’s still empty canvas where new companies can scale up to fill the middle and eventually be alongside some of those platforms. We expect those platforms to continue to grow and thrive, and we hope to build or invest in companies that can partner with them to take advantage of their distribution and ultimately make small and medium businesses better through MSPs.

All that said, what are some of those categories? I don’t think it’s new MSPs starting up and buying PSA – that market is fairly saturated. Nor do I think it’s more EDR or XDR – those are pretty saturated markets too. There’s still market share that will trade, don’t get me wrong, and innovation will build on top of it. But doubling the market requires new products, new revenue streams, and obviously AI is a critical part of that. Whether it’s the evolution of agentic service work to do all the work that should be done but isn’t, or raising productivity levels so the service is that much better, or helping the average SMB with a sophisticated IT strategy that evolves into an AI strategy – we see the category of AI services enablement for MSPs as a huge, huge opportunity.

In the enterprise, we’re living through what I call the SaaSpocalypse – the idea that big SaaS companies are going to see fewer licenses because people are going to downsize headcount and thus take an impact on their top line. But we see the SMB market as more resilient, because my accountant with 60 people and one person in marketing – they’re not going to downsize that one-person marketing department. That person is actually just going to get that much better thanks to all the tools they’re using.

SMB IT spend is expected to outpace enterprise IT spend for the first time ever in 2026. We believe that’s because of the resiliency of the SMB market – the idea that when a big tech company lays off 5,000 people, those people don’t all sail off into the sunset. A lot of them move into the SMB economy and start small businesses. Maybe the IT folks start an MSP. So we see the SMB part of the economy continuing to thrive, and it’s showing itself this year – thanks to this crazy stat that SMB IT spend will outpace enterprise IT spend for the first time ever.

For all those reasons, we’re very excited about the opportunities it creates in the companies that we’re invested in.

Robert Dutt: That is a crazy stat, and it’s worth underlining – because of where you and your peers and so much of this community is focused, right in that SMB space. And closer to home, as a Canadian podcast, we’re very much a nation of SMBs. So it really is super impactful here.

Joel Abramson: Yeah, I would agree.

Robert Dutt: For people who want to follow what you guys are doing – whether they’re founders, MSPs, or just interested in what’s coming in terms of new AI-first MSP software – where do they find you? How can they find out more?

Joel Abramson: TopDown.com. We publish a newsletter and try to share all the learnings we’re gaining each quarter. We publish a white paper annually. We have a conference in November called Horizons – if you’re interested in investing in the MSP ecosystem, our goal is to bring everybody together as peers. We do a lot of dinners and events around the big MSP events. Our goal is always to bring everyone together as peers, not in a supplier relationship where you’re being sold to – just everybody trying to solve this thing together. The community aspect of the MSP ecosystem is so strong, and that’s how you engage.

I’m pretty easy to find and always interested in a conversation with anybody from inside the ecosystem or outside, as we try to build this thing one brick at a time toward 1.3 trillion of addressable market.

Robert Dutt: Brilliant. Go get that. Go build that. I appreciate you taking the time, Joel.

Joel Abramson: Thank you so much for having me.

Robert Dutt: There you have it – Joel Abramson from Top Down Ventures.

I’d like to thank Joel for his time this morning. Thank you as always for listening to In The Channel.

A few things stuck with me from this conversation.

First, the framework Joel described: frontier AI companies at the top, then the supply chain software layer that Top Down invests in, then MSPs, then SMBs at the front line. It’s a clean way to think about how AI value actually gets delivered to small and medium businesses. And the point that MSPs are the most natural vehicle for that delivery is hard to argue with – from where I sit, and probably from where you sit too.

Second, that stat about SMB IT spend outpacing enterprise IT for the first time ever this year. If we’re in what Joel calls the SaaSpocalypse for the enterprise, we’re in a resilience story for SMB. For an audience of MSPs, that’s your market, and that’s your moment.

And the zofiQ story. A six-month hold, 5.3 times the invested capital to ConnectWise. What Joel said about what made it work – going deep into a singular problem rather than an inch deep and a mile wide – is as much a product philosophy lesson as it is a venture capital story.

If you want to follow what Top Down is doing, find them at TopDown.com, where they publish a regular newsletter and annual white paper on the state of MSP capital. Their Horizons conference runs every November if you’re engaged in this ecosystem as a founder, an operator, or an investor.

If you’re enjoying the show, please give the podcast a follow or subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or most of the major podcast directories. Ratings and reviews are always encouraged.

Until next time, I’m Robert Dutt for ChannelBuzz.ca, and I’ll see you in the channel.

Welcome to The Buzz from ChannelBuzz.ca, I’m Robert Dutt, today is Tuesday, May 12, 2026, and here’s what’s happening in the channel today.

Top Down Ventures has announced the final close of its Founders Fund I, pulling in 38 million Canadian dollars and oversubscribing its original target. According to the firm, this is the first institutional fund focused exclusively on early-stage software and artificial intelligence for the managed service provider ecosystem, which it values as a roughly 1 trillion dollar global IT services category. The fund is backed by a limited partner base of more than 100 MSP operators, including distribution giant Pax8. Top Down noted that closing the fund in the current economic environment was a challenge, but the oversubscription signals clear institutional interest in the MSP software space. The firm also pointed to its first exit as a proof point – zofiQ, an agentic AI platform for MSP service desks, was acquired by ConnectWise just six months after Top Down’s initial investment, returning 5.3 times the invested capital. Having dedicated institutional capital purpose-built for the ecosystem means the next generation of MSP tooling gets funded by people who actually understand the problem. For solution providers thinking about where the platform wars are heading over the next five years, this fund is part of that story.

New data released yesterday by Fortinet paints a stark picture of Canada’s position in the global threat landscape. According to the company’s 2026 Global Threat Landscape Report and its companion 2026 Cybersecurity Skills Gap Report, Canada has moved from third to second globally in ransomware attacks, with 374 Canadian organizations extorted last year. Total cyberattacks against Canadian targets surged to 17 billion in 2025, up from 13.7 billion the year before. Fortinet’s FortiGuard Labs says the time-to-exploit for critical vulnerabilities is now running two to four times faster than it was, driven by threat actors deploying agentic AI to accelerate reconnaissance and execution. The skills picture compounds the problem: 47 percent of Canadian IT leaders cited a lack of cybersecurity talent as a top cause of breaches, and 49 percent say they struggle to hire staff with specific AI security experience. That combination – faster attacks, a shrinking talent pool – is exactly the kind of environment where a strong MSP security practice becomes a business necessity for SMB clients, not a nice-to-have. Derek Manky, chief security strategist and global vice president of threat intelligence at FortiGuard Labs, called it an “industrialized defense” challenge.

New research from Barracuda released this morning adds another dimension to the threat picture. Based on an analysis of 3.1 billion emails, the company’s 2026 Email Threats Report finds that one in three emails is now malicious or unwanted spam. According to Barracuda, 48 percent of malicious email activity is phishing, 34 percent of organizations experience account takeover at least once per month, and 90 percent of high-volume phishing campaigns now use phishing-as-a-service kits. Perhaps most notable for the managed services conversation: 70 percent of malicious PDFs now hide phishing links inside QR codes, a tactic specifically designed to bypass traditional email filters. Barracuda positions the core finding as a shift in attacker strategy – away from noisy malware and toward stealthier, trust-based techniques that use compromised accounts and familiar file formats to slip past defenses. The report identifies growing demand for layered email and identity protection combined with automated response, which points directly to an opportunity for service providers helping customers with lean IT teams who are already stretched managing alert volume.

In Brief – Calian Group has completed its acquisition of U.S. managed service provider Computex, expanding the Ottawa-based firm’s American footprint and cybersecurity capabilities. Crogl has begun a private rollout of its AI-powered SOC platform, positioning it to help service providers automate threat response and cut alert fatigue. Pax8 and NinjaOne have announced a partnership starting as a referral motion, giving MSPs a path to RMM and unified IT operations tools while the companies work toward future marketplace integration. TD SYNNEX has given MSPs reserved access to NVIDIA GPU capacity through a deal with Nebius AI Cloud, letting channel partners deliver AI infrastructure services without buying hardware or competing with hyperscalers for GPU supply. Full details and links in the show notes or the blog post.

Later today on In The Channel, I sit down with Joel Abramson, managing partner at Top Down Ventures, to go deeper on the Founders Fund close – the LP flywheel strategy, the zofiQ exit, and what it means for the companies building the next generation of MSP software.

And if you missed it yesterday, check out my conversation with Steven Kiss, partner and national ServiceNow practice leader at EY Canada, on what building Canada’s first ServiceNow elite partner teaches you about what is coming next in the agentic enterprise.

That’s how we’re seeing the headlines today. I’m Robert Dutt for ChannelBuzz.ca, thanks for listening. Have a great day.

Robert Dutt: Hello and welcome to In The Channel from ChannelBuzz.ca, bringing news and information to the Canadian IT channel community for the last sixteen years. I’m Robert Dutt, editor of ChannelBuzz.ca, and your host for the show.

This episode wraps up our coverage from last week’s ServiceNow Knowledge 2026 conference in Las Vegas. If you’ve been following along, you’ve heard from ServiceNow’s global channel chief on how the partner model is evolving around the Agentic Business, and from ServiceNow’s Canadian leader on what all the big announcements mean for Canadian enterprises and partners specifically. This conversation is a different angle altogether – what does this moment look like from someone who’s actually been building a ServiceNow practice in Canada for over a decade?

My guest is Steven Kiss, partner and national ServiceNow practice leader at EY Canada. What makes this conversation different from a lot of partner-perspective interviews is his backstory. Steven didn’t arrive at EY through the traditional consulting path. In 2013, he co-founded SuMO IT Solutions, which became Canada’s largest ServiceNow boutique – the first gold and first elite partner in the country. EY acquired SuMO in May 2021, and Steven has been running the national ServiceNow practice from inside one of the world’s largest professional services firms ever since. EY is a global elite ServiceNow partner and the reigning worldwide partner of the year in banking, risk, and security.

That combination – born in a boutique, operating at GSI scale, winning in regulated verticals – gives him a perspective on where the channel is headed that’s worth hearing whether you’re running a five-person shop or a fifty-person one.

Let’s get right into it – my chat with Steven Kiss.

Steven, thanks for taking the time. I appreciate it.

Steven Kiss: My pleasure, Rob. Good to be here.

Robert Dutt: I want to start off with a little bit of the background. You didn’t arrive at EY through the traditional consulting angle. It’s neat that you built out a ServiceNow specialist in SuMO IT, which was then acquired. For listeners who don’t know the backstory, can you give us the elevator pitch version of what happened? And also, what does the EY ServiceNow footprint in Canada look like today?

Steven Kiss: Yeah, absolutely. I’d love to tell you that story. It goes back to 2013, where we saw an obvious opening in the market. ServiceNow was coming on strong, really starting its momentum. We had a lot of legacy HP folks and HP Service Manager, et cetera. With ServiceNow, I think there was a real opportunity to see the market redefine and reshape itself. We launched in October 2013 with just a handful of employees, and really being focused on the goal of building the best service management partner organization in the country – that was the fuel that allowed us to grow. It wasn’t about how do we grow the quickest, have the most people, have the most certifications, be the most profitable. We really just wanted to be the place that people would come to when they wanted to modernize and accelerate their transformation. And then it grew into, I would say, Canada’s largest ServiceNow boutique. We were the first gold partner in the country, and then we became the first elite partner in the country. Then up to the point in May 2021 – which is our fifth anniversary coming up in a couple of days – we completed the acquisition by EY, where we brought 85 professionals into the EY Canada organization. That’s just the high-level story.

Robert Dutt: That’s the backstory. Where’s that business at now? What does it look like in terms of scope and scale?

Steven Kiss: It’s been an incredible ride. We brought in the things that made the boutique partner super successful, which meant very deep technical skills, then expanding as the ServiceNow platform expanded. But there’s a true opportunity within an organization like EY to leverage that front-end consulting engine. EY as a legacy consulting organization is in the market every day talking about HR, cyber risk, supply chain optimization, any part of the business. What that offered them was the ability to operationalize consulting – in the real world, solve the problem for the customer by using technology. We’ve been able to grow with that through activation and integration within the firm. It’s been an incredible ride and it still continues to grow and expand today. Significant growth over the past five years.

Robert Dutt: The big theme here was obviously the Agentic Business – the argument that the pilot era is over and we’re moving towards autonomous AI deployment that shows real value. From where you sit, working with Canadian enterprises day to day, how does that land with what you’re seeing, with where people are? Are your clients there yet, or is this still aspirational for most?

Steven Kiss: Well, I think let’s put it this way. I think people have a sense of what they’d like to accomplish when we talk about the agentic enterprise – the vision of the future, the aspirational vision of tomorrow. I think that’s somewhat clear in people’s minds. It may not be fully aligned from executive to executive across the board, but I think they have an aspirational thought of what it is. A couple of years ago, Gartner put out a quote – and I hate to misquote it – but something along the lines of the vast adoption of AI in an enterprise will come from the platforms people are already using. And of course, we’ve seen that: ServiceNow, who’s been in the AI space for years and years, and other platforms that enterprises trust are obviously incorporating AI capabilities. You’ve got departmental efficiencies in a lot of cases, but I don’t think you have the end-to-end benefit of AI all the way through. You’ve got pockets of it, but the enterprise benefits are not yet being realized.

A hundred percent, like everybody says, we’re in the pilots and the kicking of the tires phase. But I think we have to think broader. This is not about how do I get my department to operate better, faster, stronger, cheaper – it’s really about the execution from request all the way through to fulfillment across the enterprise. We have the same actual goals as what we’ve had for years: breaking down silos, creating efficiencies across the enterprise, now with an expectation of accelerating all that. The good news is it’s at least a familiar challenge – a familiar motion – to break down those silos and get everyone rowing in the same direction.

Robert Dutt: A hundred percent. And I think that’s exactly it. How do you see your role, or the role of other partners, in helping organizations get that alignment across executives and get everyone prioritizing and identifying the steps?

Steven Kiss: Yeah, this is very interesting. This is where I look back on the earlier question about boutique versus the Big Four mindset now. I think of us very much along these lines. I’ve seen from the inside what organizations like EY have done. We’re a global operation – four hundred thousand people. Yes, we look at it from the Canadian lens because of being in Canada, but we’ve seen firsthand how these pockets of AI innovation turn into more enterprise workflows. Again, we’re four hundred thousand people, so any time we can see even single-digit efficiencies, that adds up to real dollars – and more importantly, less frustration for the people inside these workflows. We’re able to take these case studies and things that we’ve seen as client zero to our clients. We go, “Look, we are also a global operation. We have global employees. We understand the frictions from the inside.”

And I think being able to tap into that front-end consulting engine I mentioned a few moments ago – we are already in the market talking to the people who own that business problem, the person who feels the pain of it, potentially the budget to solve it. We’re able to bring our expertise to that story and explain how we would solve that problem. I think the adoption of platforms like ServiceNow reduces the obstacles to get there, simply because we can leverage the “using technology you already own” mindset. You don’t have to buy yet again another tool, another platform, train more people. It’s already been security vetted. You already know how to support it. Your people are used to using it. Why not simply extend it into these areas? That’s been a huge benefit of the conversations we’re having.

Robert Dutt: A big theme here – and whether you want to call it eating your own dog food or drinking your own champagne, ServiceNow tends to call it “Now on Now,” running the business on the product – I’m curious how you guys use ServiceNow internally, and especially as some of the new agentic capabilities roll in, how you’re thinking about it from an internal lens as a way to both learn and to add value to the organization.

Steven Kiss: Yeah, absolutely. It continues the thought from before – AI, obviously, is going into every department. There isn’t a department that’s not looking at it. We’re doing the exact same thing internally. We are a client of ServiceNow in addition to being a global elite partner, and we have the luxury of being able to look at it from the point of view of scale. Initially people are looking at it from the departments that are – I don’t want to necessarily say early adopters, but potentially early adopters – and IT would be one. If you think about what happened a generation ago with IT service management moving into enterprise service management, it’s the exact same thing. IT is one of the most framework-driven departments in an organization. We ourselves have deployed ServiceNow in IT for request management, traditional help desk support, ticketing, case summarization – things of that nature have been huge. HR has also been a huge accelerated adoption area with ServiceNow – onboarding new employees and things of that nature.

We also see ourselves moving very aggressively toward the target outcome of deflecting eighty-five to ninety percent of HR interactions. Things as basic as “What is the value of my flex benefit account?” or “How many days of vacation do I have?” – these are all things that the human in us wants to know nearly every day, but getting to that answer is not as easy as it should be. I have to send an email and I have to hope I get an answer. Now I can just simply ask and get the answer back. Looking at the employee from the human nature element is guiding where we’re taking it next. It’s really exciting where I’ve seen EY go from five years ago to today, and I think we’re going to see further acceleration in these areas.

Robert Dutt: You guys just won Worldwide Partner of the Year for banking and risk. Very specific distinction – not just great implementation partner, but specifically in high-stakes, regulated space. Take your victory lap. What does that actually mean in terms of what you think you’re doing that more generalist partners aren’t?

Steven Kiss: It’s incredible. And Rob, I hate to point it out – you also missed security in there. So it’s risk, security, and banking, which means we’re on the resilience side. If I take risk and security together, it’s not functional deployments of these things – it’s understanding the mindset of what resilience means to organizations, especially regulated industries like banking. This is a perfect example where these things actually come together.

I think what separates us, in addition to the obvious large footprint in the banking and financial services sector to begin with, is again leveraging that front-end consulting engine. It’s one of our largest sectors. It’s where we’ve got a ton of innovation going, especially internally at EY with our AI innovation centers, et cetera. There’s a lot of horsepower and investment directed at these. I think they’re also the sectors that are investing the most themselves. So there’s a very strong partnership. It’s truly amazing for us. We work with very large financial institutions to help them get to success in these areas.

I think it’s also not about deployment of modules. It’s not about people at hours. It’s really about outcomes and value – being able to really understand our clients, understand their business, understand their greatest challenges, connecting those issues across levels in the organization so we can understand what success looks like for them. We also have banking innovation departments with people who spend all day, every day just thinking about what the future of banking looks like. Being able to apply the value proposition of the ServiceNow alliance as part of those conversations is a huge differentiator. And this is the third year that we are the banking partner of the year, so we see continued success there.

Robert Dutt: Close to home – I keep thinking about regulated industries in Canada, data sovereignty, public sector sensitivity, OSFI E-21, all of these things. Given that you guys have practice strength in exactly those regulated environments, where do you see the biggest near-term deployment opportunities for ServiceNow in Canada specifically? And what do you see as the blockers that are still there?

Steven Kiss: Yeah, absolutely. I’ll start with blockers. I think organizations need to realize that they’ve got to get their data in order. This is the foundational element that’s going to stop rapid deployment if they don’t have it in place. They’re just going to be behind – and I don’t think the market is going to tolerate falling behind. The people who are proactive at investing in what tomorrow is going to look like will be the winners from a business perspective. That’s foundationally it.

When you start talking about OSFI E-21 and regulation, they’re very defined on what the needs are, but I don’t think those needs are defined fully – we can’t see so many years out. They will constantly evolve, because we ourselves don’t ultimately know what AI is going to look like. So how would the regulations? They’re going to constantly evolve and mature. And I think the benefit of what I’ve seen in platforms like ServiceNow is the endless ability to evolve with the times without ripping and replacing. The investments will be leveraged and built upon and refined. I haven’t seen any other organization plow as much R&D into their platform as ServiceNow has. It’s not build your own house. They’ve defined it and created the frameworks, and configuration – not customization – is going to get us where we need to go. That’s a huge differentiator. But again, it’s ultimately going to come down to navigating the endless evolution of these regulatory needs.

Robert Dutt: One of the big announcements this week – Action Fabric and the MCP integration layer – opens the door for partners to build proprietary IP on top of the platform and bring it to market as their own. Curious how you’re thinking about that. Is that something you’re doing – building reusable accelerators or industry-specific agents that you’re bringing to clients? And how do you think about the build-versus-configure question as that evolves?

Steven Kiss: Yeah. I’ll start at the end and you can keep me on the straight and narrow with the rest of the question. With clients, it’s very much about having a framework of success as you start to deploy. And as I said previously – configuration, not customization. Leveraging as much out of the box as possible, and industry-leading practices are going to drive how we deploy things. This is not about individual whims. There is a well-worn path in front of you – follow it, adapt around it, and then you are going to be running, not walking. The organizations that adapt and create that framework of success are going to be the very successful ones.

As it relates to building blocks to create IP at the partner level on top of the platform – I think we’ve seen this for years with different degrees of success – because you’re essentially thinking about it from a productizing perspective. You have to accept the fact that if you are in the productized business, you are a product organization. You need size, scale, ongoing investment. You have to have that commitment internally.

I’m a big fan of innovation where it doesn’t ratchet down the foundational capabilities of the platform. I’m a big supporter of accelerators that allow clients to get to the finish line faster – and these don’t necessarily mean we’re creating a product that locks clients into certain capabilities, because we’ve seen the negative side of that over the past five, seven, ten years. Accelerators that provide an industry-leading process to the conversation, that allow us to move the client toward the outcome of what this thing should look like – those are very positive. And once again, if you think about EY, the brand is very strong in risk, security, the resilience story. Partnering with an organization known for that just accelerates the path to the finish line.

Robert Dutt: Outside of what we’ve already talked about – or even within it – what have been your big takeaways from the event? What caught your ear the most and changed the way you think about something, or that you think is going to lead you to do something new or different in the practice once you get back home?

Steven Kiss: The show, a hundred percent. A couple of things. First of all, the way ServiceNow is actually driving the market forward. In some ways it’s very Apple-esque – the old Steve Jobs quote, “our customers don’t tell us what they need, we’re there to help guide them.” I’ve seen that with things like AI Control Tower. Everybody’s excited about the possibilities of AI, but we can’t just let it loose. It has to be governed. And we have to be able to, over our Monday morning lattes, look at a single system and understand where our position of risk is.

Number two – the areas of regulated industries and having a recommended path forward for clients operating in those sectors, being able to guide them through that in an accelerated way so we’re not waiting years to get there. Organizations are looking at this like an arms race – everyone’s running. So let’s make sure they don’t trip and get them there. Those are probably the areas where I’m the most excited about continuing to see the innovation and investment from ServiceNow. It’s something that I don’t think has ever been seen at that level. The way they’ve adapted to the AI story has been incredibly impressive – not following, very much leading. And I think it’s just very exciting.

Robert Dutt: Last one for me. Our audience is primarily VARs, MSPs, smaller solution providers – not GSIs, but folks who are watching what you guys at the big integrators are doing because it tells them something about where the market’s going. Especially given your former life leading SuMO and being in that boutique partner role – if you were advising a mid-sized MSP or other partner right now, who’s trying to figure out their AI strategy and where ServiceNow might fit within it, what would be the most important thing you’d tell them?

Steven Kiss: I think at the end of the day, a laser focus on the client and what success looks like for them. This is not about the technology – the technology is the enabler to get to success. Our secret sauce as we were building our boutique was really to say: yes, you come to us and ask us, “Hey, we want to deploy a module, we want to do this thing, we need a couple of people that are skilled at this.” I would always stop and say that’s great, we would love to have that conversation – but before we get there, what is it you’re trying to accomplish? Who in your organization benefits – customers, employees, vendors, partners? Tell me how it’s done today and tell me what you think it’s going to look like tomorrow. That’s going to be the best way we can advise you and get you there, because we want to be part of your success and create a long-term partnership.

This is not about having more certifications than you do as a differentiator. This is not about being able to code quicker. It’s really about understanding what success looks like. Yes, you make yourself successful because you understand how to deploy – and the functional component of that is selling a deliverable, people, hours. But unless you’re able to translate that into outcomes and value, and articulate the problem that this solves, there’s no way you’re going to justify budget for the next thing you’re trying to do. If you simply focus on the functional execution part and not the business side of it, you will be left behind. You have to constantly think about that. It can be exhausting sometimes, especially for partners that are more technology-driven and not business or consulting-driven. That is a comfort zone you have to get out of. And I think if you do that, you’ll find it’s a very refreshing way to guide your organization through these next steps.

Robert Dutt: That’s great advice. And I think we’re seeing a lot of momentum towards partners being encouraged to think that way. So I appreciate it being amplified. Steven, thanks for taking the time once again. Hope the rest of the show goes well for you.

Steven Kiss: Thank you very much. I appreciate it. Thank you for the time as well.

Robert Dutt: There you have it – Steven Kiss, partner and national ServiceNow practice leader at EY Canada, recorded live at Knowledge 2026 in Las Vegas.

I’d like to thank Steven for his time – and for being one of the more candid guests we’ve had on this show about what it actually takes to build and sustain a practice in this market.

And thank you for listening. Three things from this conversation worth sitting with.

First – EY as its own test lab. The detail that stuck with me most wasn’t about client work. It was Steven describing what EY is doing internally with ServiceNow – targeting eighty-five to ninety percent deflection of HR interactions, so that a question like “what’s the value of my flex benefit account?” or “how many vacation days do I have?” gets answered instantly rather than through a chain of emails. That’s a four-hundred-thousand-person organization using itself as client zero. When he talks about AI adoption in enterprises, he’s talking about something he’s watching from the inside. That credibility comes through.

Second – configuration, not customization. Steven returned to this idea more than once, and it’s worth repeating. His argument is that the partners who try to build elaborate custom solutions on top of the ServiceNow platform are going to get left behind by the partners who master what’s already there, build accelerators that help clients move faster, and focus relentlessly on business outcomes rather than technical deliverables. It’s a discipline that’s easier to say than to build into a practice culture.

And third – the advice he’d give any mid-sized MSP or solution provider right now. It comes straight from the SuMO playbook. Before you talk about what you can build or deploy, stop and ask the client what they’re actually trying to accomplish. Who benefits? How does it work today? What does tomorrow look like? That’s not a sales technique – it’s an operating philosophy. And it’s the thing he says separates partners who justify the next engagement from partners who get left behind.

That wraps up our Knowledge 2026 coverage series. Thanks for spending the week with us in Las Vegas.

If you’re finding In The Channel useful, we’d love for you to follow or subscribe wherever you’re listening. We’re on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, and most major directories. Ratings and reviews are always appreciated and always read.

Until next time, I’m Robert Dutt for ChannelBuzz.ca, and I’ll see you in the channel.

Robert Dutt: Hello and welcome to In The Channel from ChannelBuzz.ca, bringing news and information to the Canadian IT channel community for the last sixteen years. I’m Robert Dutt, editor of ChannelBuzz.ca, and your host for the show.

This week I’ve been at ServiceNow’s Knowledge 2026 conference in Las Vegas, where the company spent the week making the case for what it’s calling the Agentic Business – the argument that the AI pilot era is over and autonomous agents doing real enterprise work, governed by a platform layer, is the new reality.

Yesterday, you heard from ServiceNow’s global channel chief on what it means for the partner model. This episode is a different question: what does it actually mean if you’re a Canadian enterprise or a Canadian partner?

My guest is Cristin Gooderham, area vice president for Canada enterprise sales at ServiceNow. She’s leading the company’s go-to-market motion in Canada at what is genuinely a pivotal moment – a week where the platform her team sells just repositioned itself as the governance layer for all enterprise AI, not just workflow automation. We talked about where Canadian organizations actually are on this journey, what makes this market different from the US, and where she sees the near-term opportunity for Canadian partners.

Let’s get right into it – my chat with Cristin Gooderham.

Cristin, thanks for taking the time. I appreciate it.

Cristin Gooderham: I’m very excited to be here. Thank you so much for taking the time with me.

Robert Dutt: Well, and thanks for having me out to Knowledge to get a sense of what’s going on here. When you look at where Canadian enterprises are right now on AI adoption – a big theme obviously this week is moving from proof of concepts to proving actual value – where do you see the Canadian market in that regard? Are we ahead, behind, or is it more complicated than that?

Cristin Gooderham: I wouldn’t say we’re behind. I would say we’re right on pace with what I’ve seen from my US counterparts. We have some organizations that are driving full force ahead, and then we do have some that are still stuck in that POC landscape where they’re really still struggling to define what they want AI to be for them – which is probably the biggest thing. Where we’ve seen organizations really do a tremendous job is where they’ve come with a very strong point of view of what their business challenge was and tried to look at it from an AI perspective, versus “I wonder what AI could solve for me.”

Robert Dutt: The more concrete the approach, the better it sounds like.

Cristin Gooderham: Absolutely. Tying everything to a business outcome that can actually, particularly if it can support revenue, is where we see organizations find not just the energy but the funding to put towards it.

Robert Dutt: Bill McDermott’s framing this morning was the AI blind spot – organizations running agents without governance visibility, which has kind of been the state of play up until now. Given what you know about Canadian enterprises – whether it’s regulatory caution, public sector sensitivity, or just Canadian conservatism in terms of not wanting to be first out on that limb – do you think that message lands differently in Canada than it does in the US or other markets?

Cristin Gooderham: I think for ServiceNow it lands even stronger in the Canadian market because of that conservatism. The reality is platforms like ServiceNow are really bringing to the market true visibility into your AI asset estate and the ability to actually govern and audit what is going on with your AI agents. No one is going to win the AI race by having all the agents – that’s just not a realistic expectation. But having visibility into what all those agents are doing, particularly once they start talking to each other – I think Canadian organizations are going to be very interested to have a view of that estate before they make massive investments in AI. We’ve already had those discussions with a lot of clients who really want to understand: of course we want to get AI, of course we want to find efficiency gains, but we need to do it in a way that we can govern it. That’s been a very key message, and it’s great to hear Bill reiterating it here because that’s really what ServiceNow can bring to the table.

Robert Dutt: How live has that governance discussion been with clients to date?

Cristin Gooderham: I would say the discussion has been very live. The implementation and action of it – we are working diligently on that piece. Where we’ve seen success is with clients in particular verticals that are far more mature with ServiceNow than others. Our banks in Canada, for example, have been invested in ServiceNow and really viewing us as a strategic platform since as early as 2010 in some cases. They’ve made investments not just from an IT point of view but have expanded into the security and risk areas of our platform. Those are the ones where we’re having the most productive discussions and are really moving quickly beyond proof of value into true value.

Robert Dutt: I’m curious to what degree you see the regulatory environment as backfilling that as well – how often is it being driven by existing or coming regulation, especially in regulated industries?

Cristin Gooderham: As always, the laws are typically behind the technology. What I’ve seen is that our own customers are taking a very forward-facing look at it because they know that regulation will be something to consider. We’ve had tremendous discussions on AI processing data, data at rest, Canadian sovereignty of the data. That has been a really hot topic. There’s no strong directive coming from the federal government to say all data must reside in Canada at all times. But the AI component has made it very interesting, and it’s a discussion we’re having constantly with customers.

Robert Dutt: A stat that came up yesterday was that ninety percent of ServiceNow implementations globally are partner-involved or partner-delivered. What does that mix look like in Canada? What can you tell me about GSIs versus smaller partners? Are you seeing a new breed of more specialized, AI-focused partners emerging that are punching above their weight?

Cristin Gooderham: The partner ecosystem in Canada is absolutely a complete mix – everything from global GSIs down to extremely unique niche partners. Over the last few years, we did see a tremendous amount of our really strong boutique partners actually get acquired by global GSIs. When I got to ServiceNow six years ago, we had a tremendous amount of point partners – ServiceNow-specialized and very focused on a particular part of our platform. That went away for a bit because so many GSIs were excited about the opportunity to expand their ServiceNow practices. Now we’re seeing the resurgence of those smaller point solution partners coming back with a ServiceNow-only, AI-first view, which has been really exciting to see.

Robert Dutt: I wonder if this becomes a cycle that repeats itself as those folks grow up and we see another wave of consolidation down the road.

Cristin Gooderham: Potentially, absolutely. But the opportunity for partners in Canada to focus on ServiceNow is tremendous. We’re really excited to see some of these up-and-coming partners. We had two recently launched in Western Canada – both Ardent Labs and Skymark – taking a ServiceNow-only focus, which is a very different approach than the GSIs. The GSIs are fantastic, but they look holistically. A ServiceNow-dedicated partner can really make an impact in ways a GSI won’t necessarily prioritize.

Robert Dutt: One trend we’re seeing across the channel is multi-partner engagement becoming more common. You’re nodding as I say that. I’m curious what you’re seeing in terms of situations where a big GSI tags in more specialized partners to fill the bench and meet customer needs.

Cristin Gooderham: It is absolutely critical and something we at ServiceNow fully support. We do it ourselves – we have our own expert services, and a lot of times we will engage niche partners to fill particular gaps. One of the areas where I see our partner ecosystem doing that a tremendous amount is in the security and risk space, because some partners are phenomenal on the overall platform but security and risk is a different skill set – it’s even a different vocabulary. I love seeing partners collaborate because it’s usually the best option for the customer. It’s the best outcome for everybody: the partners are successful, the customer is successful, and therefore ServiceNow is successful.

Robert Dutt: I realize this is not how one builds out a business model, but I’m curious – as you said, there’s a rising generation of ServiceNow-focused partners. If you were to point to the greenfield, the underserviced opportunity in the Canadian market today, what would it be?

Cristin Gooderham: So I’ve touched on it already – security and risk. With our acquisitions of both Armis and Veza, that is an area where we’re going to continue to invest. If ServiceNow partners are looking to expand their skill set, that is where we need additional help. When we started having the AI Control Tower discussion late last year, it was at every executive briefing the thing that made every CIO sit up and pay attention. So anything in that space is really where we’re going to need to see continued partner enablement and adoption, and hopefully new partners coming in to pick it up.

Beyond that, as we continue to make moves into the CRM space, those are also going to be areas where we need additional partners. We have phenomenal partners from the US that come up and do work here, but as an opportunity for more Canadian jobs, that’s definitely an area I would point Canadian partners toward.

Robert Dutt: The AI Factory and NVIDIA partnership that came up – how do you see that through a Canadian lens?

Cristin Gooderham: I think the key piece is that NVIDIA and ServiceNow together have a great story. We know most of our customers are investing in NVIDIA – a number of the telcos, we’ve already had discussions with them. So it’s really an opportunity for us to continue to expand our AI footprint and help create really positive three-way relationships. As NVIDIA becomes more and more critical in every market, it’s fantastic to see that they see the value in ServiceNow – and our customers are seeing the same thing.

Robert Dutt: Data sovereignty – big issue in the Canadian market. It sounded from your earlier comments like it’s not quite a hard regulatory concern yet, but how do you see it playing out? What are customers asking you about?

Cristin Gooderham: Data sovereignty is a hot topic in every customer engagement we have. In the public sector space it has a tremendous amount of weight. We’ve seen a real shift from the federal government in terms of their position on sovereignty – they haven’t come out and defined very strongly what data sovereignty looks like, but it’s absolutely something we’re focused on. We announced earlier last year a large investment in Canada to build out our own isolated full stack to host all of our public sector clients, ensuring Canadians on Canadian soil are managing the data.

But it does stop somewhat short of true sovereignty. The benefit of SaaS is the ability to push upgrades to customers at any given time – as soon as you move to true data sovereignty, that piece closes off. It doesn’t make it a negative, it’s just something clients need to make decisions on.

Robert Dutt: With AI Control Tower coming online and the way Bill was repositioning the company around that governance layer – as almost the orchestrator of the ecosystem – how does that change the partner role?

Cristin Gooderham: I don’t think it changes the partner role tremendously. As you heard in the keynote this morning, we’ve always been the platform of platforms, and we’re still advocating that message. It’s just refined itself to really focus on securing and governing the AI estate, as opposed to a more open approach. Partners are still going to be critical to help us get customers to success. But it does mean that retraining and focus into those areas – understanding the security and governance piece – is going to be critical moving forward.

Robert Dutt: The security piece is so big in the channel writ large. Do you see it as another entry point for new partners to come into the ServiceNow ecosystem and add what you’re doing to what they’re doing with other vendors and their own managed services?

Cristin Gooderham: Absolutely. Where I think there’s a really interesting opportunity is for more security-focused partners that perhaps haven’t focused on ServiceNow before – they’re focused on multiple different point solutions – to actually start looking at ServiceNow as another tool to put in their bag. We are having expanded security conversations all the time. I think it’s very clear through our acquisitions that this is going to be a continued focus.

A security partner like Arctiq, for example – they’re already engaged a lot with us, and I believe they’re already engaged with Armis. This could be a really interesting push for them to take on more of ServiceNow. The good part is that there’s no shortage of security tools out there to take on. The challenge as a partner is the same thing – there’s no shortage of security tools to take on.

Robert Dutt: Is that mindshare conversation with security-focused partners already happening, or is there a strategy to identify the right partners and get on their radar?

Cristin Gooderham: Those conversations are already happening – not necessarily with the more niche individual security partners yet, but a number of the GSIs have very strong security and risk practices. We’ve had a lot of reach out from Canadian partners at organizations like KPMG, where they run a security and risk practice and are very excited about these acquisitions and wanting to discuss how this folds into their practice. So there’s definitely opportunity at every level of partner.

Robert Dutt: We talked a little bit about governance, and I noticed that Bell Canada is presenting tomorrow on the subject of their governance guardrails implementation. What can you tell me about that relationship and what they’ve done? Are we starting to see a cluster of organizations moving toward that space, or is Bell still more of a bellwether?

Cristin Gooderham: When we talk about Bell, we have to talk about two different angles. We have Bell as a customer – Bell Business, who are a phenomenal customer we’ve engaged with in a very long-term relationship and who have made a huge investment to innovate on the ServiceNow platform. And then underneath Bell we also have their partner, Acteamo, which is a fully Bell-backed organization that is a services partner in the Canadian ecosystem. So there’s Bell as the customer and Bell as the partner. We have phenomenal relationships with both, and we’re very excited to see what Acteamo is doing in the ecosystem. I know they’re looking to expand not only across Canada but even into the US to bring some of the learnings from working with Bell Canada to other telcos.

Robert Dutt: When you’re talking to Canadian solution providers who’ve seen the announcements this week and are trying to figure out where they fit in the whole Agentic Business picture – what’s your advice on where to focus, where to build practice, where the opportunity is richest and most accessible right now in the Canadian market?

Cristin Gooderham: I’ll go back to what I said at the very beginning – focus on business outcomes. Nobody is interested in a discussion on agentic AI to modernize your CMDB. It’s truly about finding problems in the organization where AI can lead to either revenue generation or true cost savings. Where partners will be successful is if they can quickly identify – whether it’s verticalized opportunities across oil and gas, telco, or retail – areas where they’ve had success before and can bring that to customers. I don’t know that there’s a single point of entry. The challenge with AI is that it can do so many things. But Canadians like to start small. They like to be able to prove something out quickly, and then they like to move fast. So I would always caution partners: look for opportunities to do just that. Start small, move quickly, and then progress to the next step.

Robert Dutt: That’s great advice. I appreciate your time, especially given how busy things are. You really helped put a Canadian lens on a lot of what we’ve heard this week.

Cristin Gooderham: Thank you so much.

Robert Dutt: There you have it – Cristin Gooderham, area vice president for Canada enterprise sales at ServiceNow, recorded live at Knowledge 2026 in Las Vegas.

I’d like to thank Cristin for her time during what was clearly a very busy week for the ServiceNow team.

And thank you for listening. A few things worth pulling out of this one.

First – the Canadian conservatism point. Cristin made the case that the traits that have historically made Canadian enterprises slower adopters – caution around governance, preference for proven approaches, regulatory sensitivity – are actually an advantage in this specific moment. The agentic AI conversation leads with governance. That’s a message that lands here before it lands anywhere else, and that’s an opening for partners.

Second – the partner ecosystem observation. What she described is a market that went through a consolidation phase where boutique ServiceNow specialists got absorbed by larger integrators, and is now seeing a new generation of AI-first specialists starting to emerge and fill that gap again. If you’re a mid-sized Canadian solution provider trying to figure out where you fit, that’s encouraging news.

And third – security as the door. The Armis and Veza acquisitions she referenced aren’t just product additions. They’re a signal that ServiceNow is actively trying to pull in a new category of security-domain partners who haven’t historically been in the ServiceNow ecosystem. If your practice is in that space, it’s worth paying attention.

More from Knowledge 2026 on Monday, when I’ll have my conversation with Steven Kiss, partner and national ServiceNow practice leader at EY Canada – a conversation about what the boutique-to-big-four journey actually teaches you about where the channel is headed next.

If you’re finding In The Channel useful, we’d love for you to follow or subscribe wherever you’re listening. We’re on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, and most major directories. Ratings and reviews are always appreciated and always read.

Until next time, I’m Robert Dutt for ChannelBuzz.ca, and I’ll see you in the channel.

Welcome to The Buzz from ChannelBuzz.ca, I’m Robert Dutt, today is Friday, May 8, 2026, and here’s what’s happening in the channel today.

Managing Microsoft 365 Copilot is becoming a genuine operational challenge for MSPs, and a company called inforcer is positioning itself as the answer with the launch of its new Copilot Manager feature. The company, which makes Microsoft 365 multi-tenant management software for managed service providers, says Copilot Manager gives partners in-depth visibility into Copilot adoption trends across all client tenants, and – critically – the ability to monitor shadow AI usage. According to inforcer, as many as eighty percent of SMB employees are bringing their own AI tools to work, using unauthorized or open-source applications that increase the risk of data leakage. The company cites IBM research suggesting one in five organizations have experienced a breach due to shadow AI, with those carrying high shadow AI exposure averaging six hundred and seventy thousand dollars more in breach costs.

The business case here is straightforward for solution providers. Copilot has crossed twenty million paid seats. The licensing is in motion. What most MSPs lack is the infrastructure to make Copilot governance a repeatable, billable service rather than a one-time check-in conversation. Copilot Manager has already been trialed in beta by more than two hundred MSPs globally, and the company says it builds directly on a Copilot Readiness Assessment tool released last year, giving partners a documented progression from pre-sales evaluation through ongoing managed AI services.

SUSE has launched a new Sovereign Partners Specialization as part of its channel program, a move that carries meaningful implications for the Canadian market. The announcement came at the company’s annual SUSECON conference in Prague last month, with details emerging publicly this week. SUSE is positioning the specialization as an agile layer on top of its existing partner program, designed specifically for early-mover partners who already hold sovereign field certifications and are invested in the sovereign technology market. According to Hayley Wienszczak, SUSE’s head of global partner programs and success, the initial go-to-market will focus on existing SUSE MSPs who know the technology stack, working jointly to onboard the first reference customers onto a full SUSE sovereign stack.

More than ninety-eight percent of SUSE’s business runs through partners, and the company is framing the sovereign play as an opportunity to lock in that partner ecosystem around an emerging but fast-growing requirement. For Canadian MSPs, the timing aligns with accelerating regulatory pressure around data sovereignty – OSFI’s E-21 guideline on technology and third-party risk, Quebec’s Law 25, and federal Protected B requirements are all pushing enterprise buyers toward environments where data residency is a verifiable, contractual commitment rather than a vendor promise. SUSE is also opening co-sell registration to ISVs and system integrators alongside MSPs as part of the same program update.

Earlier this week, Cayosoft launched a full-cycle Microsoft identity migration service that it says is designed to address the ongoing risk that sits inside most Active Directory and Entra ID environments. The offering, called Cayosoft Microsoft Migration Services, is being delivered in partnership with XMS Solutions, a long-time provider of migration and cybersecurity services. According to the company, the service covers Active Directory, Entra ID, Microsoft 365, Exchange, SharePoint, Teams, and related identity infrastructure, and spans the complete lifecycle from pre-migration assessment through phased execution, data integrity validation, and post-migration monitoring, governance, and recovery.

The launch targets a specific and frequently mismanaged problem: migrations that declare success on go-live day while leaving behind broken permissions, duplicated identities, and poorly governed access that creates security exposure for months afterward. Cayosoft is specifically calling out M&A, divestitures, and consolidation scenarios as high-risk contexts. For Microsoft-focused channel partners, the model Cayosoft is describing – migration as the front door into a longer-term identity management and recovery engagement – represents a services motion that can extend well beyond the initial project. Partners who have historically treated Active Directory migrations as one-time engagements may find this a useful framework for repackaging that work as an ongoing managed practice.

In Brief

Kaseya has unveiled what it is calling the first Agentic IT Management Platform, powered by a proprietary dataset the company calls Kaseya Intelligence. 

GuidePoint Security has been named CrowdStrike’s 2026 Americas Partner of the Year after the two companies surpassed one billion dollars in cumulative joint sales. 

Dyna Software is showcasing its Platform Copilot at ServiceNow Knowledge 2026, positioning the tool as a way to generate ServiceNow configurations from natural language and images. 

Kyndryl has announced updates pushing AI deeper into its IT operations practice, expanding autonomous resolution capabilities across its global managed services engagements. 

Upwind has launched new runtime visibility support for Windows Server virtual machines across AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud Platform, addressing a gap in cross-platform endpoint coverage. 

Full details and links in the show notes or the blog post.

Later today on In The Channel, we continue our Knowledge 2026 series with Cristin Gooderham, area vice president of Canada enterprise sales at ServiceNow, on what the shift to agentic business looks like from a Canadian market perspective.

And if you haven’t heard it yet, yesterday on In The Channel we published my conversation with Michael Park, ServiceNow’s global channel chief, on why the company put its AI product leader in charge of the channel – and what that means for how partners get built and compensated going forward. 

That’s how we’re seeing the headlines today. I’m Robert Dutt for ChannelBuzz.ca, thanks for listening. Have a great day.

Robert Dutt: Hello and welcome to In The Channel from ChannelBuzz.ca, bringing news and information to the Canadian IT channel community for the last sixteen years. I’m Robert Dutt, editor of ChannelBuzz.ca and your host for the show.

I’m recording this from Las Vegas, where I’ve spent the last few days at ServiceNow’s Knowledge 2026 conference. The big theme of the week has been what ServiceNow is calling the Agentic Business – the idea that we’ve moved past the AI pilot era and into a world where autonomous AI agents are doing real work, governed by a platform layer that sits above everything else running in your enterprise.

That governance layer – ServiceNow’s AI Control Tower – is central to how the company is repositioning itself. And it raises a real question for the channel. If ServiceNow is now the arbiter of how AI gets governed and orchestrated across the enterprise, what does that mean for partners? Who do they want to work with? How does the delivery model change? And how do you build a services business in a world where the traditional implementation and configuration work is being compressed by AI itself?

My guest today is the person who has to answer those questions for a living. Michael Park is the senior vice president of global partnerships and channels at ServiceNow. What makes his appointment interesting is that he didn’t come up through channel sales or alliances. He most recently led AI go-to-market strategy for ServiceNow before being tapped to run the partner organization. It’s a deliberate choice, and it says something about how the company is thinking about what the channel needs to be right now.

Let’s get right into it – my chat with Michael Park.

Michael, thanks for taking the time. I appreciate it.

Michael Park: Great to be here.

Robert Dutt: You have an interesting background coming into leading the partner organization, coming from the product strategy side – and particularly given where we sit, with the topic du jour being AI product strategy. Was that an intentional path on ServiceNow’s part? And if it was, what does it say about how the organization at large is thinking about where the partner organization needs to be right now?

Michael Park: Yeah, I think it was intentional by Bill and the management team. The AI stuff is relatively new. And having the opportunity to lead AI go-to-market from the beginning, and helping the organization as a whole go from zero to where we are now with it – when you’re first in, you learn a lot. The good and the bad. And I think that first year in the job, I did over 500 actual customer meetings, just explaining what AI is, how to get to value with it, what the platform is.

And so I think when we started looking at where the market’s going, we realized that ServiceNow is on a wonderful trajectory for where we’ve come over the last twenty years. But for the next generation, what we need to do is take everything we know and figure out how we build for scale to enable the partners to execute with even greater scale. And so a big part of that was taking what I know, moving it over to the channel, and then driving the channel.

And so as you heard yesterday from the mantra of our whole operating strategy – we must be first customer obsessed, and we do it in a way that we’re AI led. But then we deliver it in a way that we’re partner empowered. And so it’s a very simple mantra that keeps the GPC, the Global Partner and Channel organization, grounded in what we’re here to do.

Robert Dutt: A lot of channel chiefs tend to come up through sales, maybe through alliances, occasionally through marketing. When you’re coming in from the lens that you have – having led AI product – what do you see that you think a traditional channel chief might not? Where are the blind spots, since that was one of the words of the day on the main stage earlier, in how the industry has been thinking about how partner programs and partner value are structured?

Michael Park: Well, if you go back all the way through my resume, I’ve been in and out of product, marketing, and sales jobs. And so my special skill is that I’ve been able to sit at the intersection of customer demand, the business model, and technology innovation – and I can translate between those three.

And so really the only difference with AI right now is the pattern for thirty years has really been the same as new technologies come in. It’s just happening a lot faster. The floor of adoption has become easier because of the way you can administer an LLM, which has raised the ceiling on what the art of the possible is. And so I think what I would say is it’s not so much about the skill set of a channel leader or a product leader. It’s the ability to think in an agile way, to really free your mind from a locked-in pattern – to understand the need, the technology, and the business model, and say, hey, is there a better way to create a new outcome here? And that’s where I’m seeing the real great leaders emerge.

I also think the other thing about AI is that the change management required to administer value creation at this kind of speed requires real conviction and the ability to really understand change management. Because the tech is the tech – but changing the behavior, the mindset of somebody, while there’s also the looming threat of job insecurity, everything else going on in this world, things changing so fast for a lot of people that aren’t used to changing fast – it’s as much about the leadership mindset of change management as it is the adoption of the new technology.

Robert Dutt: With AI Control Tower, it seems like there’s a real effort to position ServiceNow as the governance layer – even more so than before – sitting above everything else running in an enterprise. Does that change what you need from partners, who you partner with, or how you deepen relationships as you build out the orchestration-plus-governance story?

Michael Park: I think the channel is always evolving to meet the needs of the market. And what is happening now is you’ve seen this enormous surge of token consumption happen in the last two years. Now, whether you’re getting the return on investment for all those tokens you’re paying for is another question altogether. But the other constant we see in the enterprise is that there’s not one platform. There are multiple platforms people are using, multiple elements, multiple agents being built. And one of the inconsistencies there is – do you have a consistent way of setting thresholds on token consumption across platforms in a unified way? Do you have a way to administer compliance and security or risk management protocols over MCP servers that different groups are building on different platforms? Can you administer a regulatory or company-specific compliance policy across multiple agents on multiple platforms? And today’s answer is no, no, no, no.

So we see this incredible opportunity – because, Rob, in many ways we’re already in the game. We have this product called IRM, integrated risk management, where we do cross-company compliance and risk management and security modeling for many industries – banking, healthcare, manufacturing, etc. And so this is just a natural-order expansion of where we’re coming from in the context of integrated risk management, and even IT services management, because at the end of the day that’s a catalog of IT assets being managed, with life cycles being managed in relation to employees.

So AI Control Tower is just the next evolution, saying: regardless of what the asset is in the AI world, we will tag it, we will track it, and we will administer policy, compliance, performance, and risk management over it – the same way we’ve done for IT, the same way we do for integrated risk.

So those partners that have been with us on that journey, it’s a natural progression for them. But then with the acquisition of Veza and Armis, it takes us into an even deeper realm of security. With Veza, with identity – so that as every agent stands up and more non-human identities are set up, we have secure identity management over every one of those assets, easily administered as part of AI Control Tower. And then with Armis, the OT element – really being able to tag beyond just IT, any asset in the enterprise, and administer the same process with AI Control Tower – makes it very, very powerful in what we can do in a multi-vendor way. Like our game, as you heard from Bill today, is we’re friendly to all, because we can administer a common policy over anybody that wants to play with it. And that’s a slightly different approach right now.

Robert Dutt: Security and governance – such a big area, such a hot spot in the channel, and one that a really broad variety of partners play in. Do you see an opportunity to reach out to partners who maybe historically haven’t been in the ServiceNow sphere, as a result of going deeper into the security space?

Michael Park: Lots and lots of opportunity. If you look at the history of ServiceNow up until recently, most of our channel was activated as a mechanism to implement software – ServiceNow software that ServiceNow direct sales sold. But now that we’re surpassing the fifteen billion dollar mark and continuing to grow at twenty percent, the opportunity for us to scale has to be more leveraged through different partner ecosystems, many of which we’re not even tapped into yet.

So there’s going to be growth for the existing partners who continue to grow with us. And then as we get into new buying centers, there are going to be lots of partners already existing in the security domain who will be able to use Veza and Armis and the new AI Control Tower as a way to extend their security practice and build new practices on ServiceNow that they haven’t had before. And what I like about that is they have domain expertise in security that we don’t – but we have a platform and technology that they don’t. And the two make well together, just as much as one of our more traditional partners who really understands ServiceNow but is entering a new domain.

Robert Dutt: One of the big topics here at the event writ large has been getting past proof of concept – past “the board’s excited about AI, so we have to do AI” – to AI that actually proves its value in business outcomes. Can you tell me a little bit about what you’re doing in terms of enablement to help partners realize that opportunity and have the skill sets and tools they need?

Michael Park: Yeah, this goes to the operating strategy of what we call AI led. And for us, AI led starts with my own organization, GPC. When I took the job a year ago, one of the operating strategies I laid down is: if we cannot ourselves be AI fluent in the way we operate with our partners, we cannot expect our partners to be AI fluent. So we’ve been using the ServiceNow technology, we’ve been using Claude, we’ve been using Copilot, we’ve been using a couple of other vendors to basically operate the ServiceNow Global Partners and Channels group. The content we create, the policies we administer, the training we do – it’s all been agentified now.

In the last year, we’ve been able to identify about thirty-four percent of the redundant work that doesn’t add a lot of value. We’ve administered it away – either automated it or built AI agents to do that work. And we’re reorienting our people toward the more value-added work that is literally facing the partner, to help them drive business.

And if you go out and talk to partners, they will tell you – yeah, we’re kind of seeing that from ServiceNow. We expect that over time our partners will also pick that up.

So if you think about the opportunity for partners – all that we’ve done is also shaping into the enablement we’re building. For example, we have a hundred billion workflows today that are already operating, most of which are not yet agentified. So we don’t have to go build from scratch. We have to go agentify the workflows that are already running. It’s a huge opportunity for partners that we cannot possibly administer directly on our own without them.

One of the unique things about ServiceNow is that ninety percent of the deployments we do are actually done through partners. Only ten percent is direct. So the partner already plays an important role. But we want them to go beyond that – because in this new world of AI, as we talked about in the keynote, the installation, implementation, configuration, and upgrade work will get agentified in the next two years. So the services they’ve been driving for twenty or thirty years are going to get compressed into a smaller order effect.

But the new services we need require the skill sets we were just talking about – knowing how to use AI Control Tower, administering data graph connections, learning how to use multiple models of inference to plug in and call the ServiceNow workflow. These are all new value-added services that will help re-engineer a company. And it was also why I was reinforcing the value calculator assessment tool – you can’t just sell AI. You have to be able to articulate what the ROI is, what the benefit is, quantified from the telemetry of what you’re getting out of the platform.

We’ve delivered that baseline telemetry and asked partners to take it, learn it, and make it theirs. It’s not a completed product – we expect them to put their special sauce on it and then bring it to the customer. And then on top of that, we announced outcome-driven services, which is using that analytics baseline to drive into defining the business outcome and quantifying it – rather than just billing time and materials the old school way.

Robert Dutt: As that shift happens – as workflows become more autonomous, more agentic, and per-seat starts to feel like a legacy metric – how does that change how you think about partner incentives and compensation? Does the model shift toward outcome-based, consumption-based, something else? And how do you make sure partners can actually build a business around that transition?

Michael Park: The way we measure partner value contribution today is what we call sourced. The partner is sourcing value to ServiceNow – they’re bringing us a customer. Whether that’s licenses or consumption of AI, it’s still sourced. So the metrics we hold partners accountable to – sourced and adoption – don’t change. What changes is the speed.

What we expect now is that partners won’t source something that takes three years to deliver. We expect partners to source in a hundred days, deliver the first point of value in a hundred days, then do the next one in a hundred days, and then the next one and the next one. So in five hundred days you’ve had five points of sourced value creation and adoption – versus the old way, where you do one source point and three years later you come out with some kind of value. And so that I think is the new model.

And this is where ServiceNow’s platform is uniquely suited. If you go learn the ServiceNow platform, you can start in IT, move to HR, move to CRM, move to procurement. But the tools to build the agents, the tools to do the data connectors, the querying and reporting, the declarative modeling, the tools to call MCP – it’s the exact same across every different buying center. So the business model leverage for the partner is: once they’re trained up on the ServiceNow platform, they can administer and monetize any kind of workflow above it using the same skill set. The economics will be a higher operating cash flow margin per dollar of resource invested in the ServiceNow practice versus any other technology out there.

Robert Dutt: You opened the door with the words “hundred days” there. One of the big things you teed up on Monday, and then Bill talked about this morning, was the Go Live AI guarantee – the idea of a hundred days to real, active, measurable ROI on AI, as a guarantee. How does that work with partners? What’s the mechanic? Is there a co-delivery model, a financial backstop? And what does a partner need to do to carry that guarantee to a customer?

Michael Park: We had a number of partners step into the offer. We shared it with our most accredited partners first and asked them if they’d be interested. And we had quite a few step in.

We will prime. So the first way out, ServiceNow will prime that particular service. It’s a paid service the customer pays for. Upon delivery of the hundred days of service is when the last leg of that service bill comes. The way the model will work with a partner is the partner will be sub-primed into the prime model for some period of time, until we can get the operating model strong. Then as we do that – as we get the tooling and the procedures right – we’ll syndicate that out to the partner network so they can do it on their own and actually prime on their own.

But the first way, we need to prime just to get it right. The key is making sure we’re taking that learning and thinking about scaling and syndicating the model so that it’s not taking services from the partner – it’s actually replacing the proof of concept. Because typically a proof of concept takes about a hundred days. But if the platform’s already in, on ServiceNow, and the workflow’s already running, and all we have to do is activate the AI agent – which as you saw on stage is already built – then the risk is just turning it on out of the box. So the precondition of this service is that you have to deploy the out-of-the-box stuff we built, because we’re confident and we’ve seen enough that we know we can get the partner and the customer to value under a hundred days.

And then the beauty is: once you’ve got that point of value in the hundred days and you’ve proven it, the next projects come online very quickly. What we believe will happen is the hundred days leads to an expansion of book of business for the partners, because once that’s in, the customer will want to start more projects.

Robert Dutt: By nature, you’re saying that over time this is going to trickle down to situations where partners are prime. I’m assuming this is an ongoing thing – more program than promo, it sounds like.

Michael Park: Yeah – it’s a program, it’s not a promo. The promo was the Control Tower offer. That was the promo, direct to customer. But the prime offer is going to be there for a while. The last meeting I was just in, a partner said, “we’re all in because we’re already doing it – we’re going to run this in parallel to you guys. But what we like about it is if you’re going to run a program around it and create that brand and your sellers are going to activate it, we will come in behind you.” So I think the smarter partners are already on board starting to do it that way. Because the key is we can easily get this into a customer who is already up and running with ServiceNow on the core workflows – all we’re doing is activating the agentic workflow on top of it.

Robert Dutt: Action Fabric was another one of the big announcements – opening the platform to external AI models via MCP. It’s interesting – you’ve got that opening motion going one way with Action Fabric, and then the opening going the other way with AI Control Tower keeping an eye on things from above.

Michael Park: Correct.

Robert Dutt: Specifically around the MCP side – are you seeing partners start to build proprietary agent skills or vertical IP on top of ServiceNow that they’re bringing to market as their own? And is that something you’re actively encouraging as a route to market?

Michael Park: It’s actually called Action Fabric – I think Bill described it as Agent Fabric, but regardless of what you call it, it is basically calling the full power of the automation runtime of ServiceNow.

What I think will happen is lots of different kinds of partners will be able to use their domain expertise in a particular industry, geography, or segment, identify a problem to be solved, use an LLM to gain inference off the data sets that feed it, and then very easily call the ServiceNow runtime to deliver the workflow. And hopefully AI Control Tower will sit on top of that and administer all the other AI components that might be feeding other workflows around it.

The key is to set up for flexibility in different patterns. Some people will come in through an MCP server because they’re building something on the outside. Others will choose to use ServiceNow’s build-agent capability and build inside the ServiceNow platform. Others will basically say, I’m already building on five other agent platforms and I’m just going to put AI Control Tower on top to administer common control. The design point is to create flexibility for the customer – to give them the options they need without slowing them down or forcing them into a particular angle.

The flip side is: if we just say “here’s ServiceNow, build whatever MCP server you want” without Action Fabric, that’s going to create all kinds of problems. Everyone will create MCP servers against ServiceNow that aren’t properly administered, there’ll be performance issues, and then the question becomes, “that ServiceNow stuff’s not working” – and we’ll be saying, yeah, because you built an MCP server the wrong way. So part of this is about setting patterns that can be replicated with high security, high scale, and high repeatability, by either the customer or the partner, in safe, secure, high-performance ways.

Robert Dutt: Last one for me – a partner comes to you and says, I want to be one of your top AI delivery partners in the next couple of years. What do you need them to build, to be, to do, to have, that maybe they don’t today?

Michael Park: We have a certification path to all of the different kinds of skills a partner may choose to be in. And we just introduced our new SKU structure for ServiceNow products. In the past, you actually had to buy the highest tier SKU to get AI. What changed just a few weeks ago is that even in the base tier product, AI is naturally embedded. So AI – and certification – becomes a consequence of every single product we sell now.

What we’ve done in getting partners ready for that is: the AI certification used to stand separately. You had to go get it. Now it’s natively built into every product they’re getting activated on. And the beauty is that our products are all built from the same platform – so once you learn the AI capability natively in IT, it’s the same capability in HR, in procurement, in ERP. That makes getting the partner ecosystem up to speed technically much, much easier.

Robert Dutt: Michael, I’m sure it’s a busy week and a half for you, but I appreciate your taking the time.

Michael Park: Happy to. Thanks for the time.

Robert Dutt: There you have it – Michael Park, senior vice president of global partnerships and channels from ServiceNow, live at Knowledge 2026 in Las Vegas.

I’d like to thank Michael for his time, especially in the middle of what is clearly a very full week for the ServiceNow team.

And thank you for listening. A few things I’d pull out of this conversation as worth sitting with.

First, on the Go Live AI guarantee – Michael was pretty explicit that this is a program, not a promotion. The current model has ServiceNow as prime, with partners sub-primed into the delivery. But the stated intent is to syndicate that model out so partners can eventually carry it themselves. If you’re a ServiceNow partner and you’re not already thinking about how your practice gets certified to prime a hundred-day engagement, that’s a conversation worth starting now rather than later.

Second, the services compression point is real and worth taking seriously. Michael said it plainly – implementation, configuration, and upgrade work is going to get compressed in the next two years. The partners who come out ahead are going to be the ones who’ve already built the new competencies: AI Control Tower administration, Action Fabric and MCP integration, outcome-driven services built on telemetry. Those are the new billable skills.

And third, I found the economics argument compelling. The platform leverage point – that the same skill set applies across IT, HR, CRM, procurement, and every other buying center on the ServiceNow platform – is a real differentiator for partners who go deep on ServiceNow versus spreading across multiple vendors. Five sourced value points in five hundred days versus one in three years is a different kind of business.

More from Knowledge 2026 coming later this week, including the Canadian and GSI perspective on what all these announcements actually mean for the local market back home.

If you’re finding In The Channel useful, we’d love for you to follow or subscribe wherever you’re listening. We’re on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, and most major directories. Ratings and reviews are always appreciated and always read.

Until next time, I’m Robert Dutt for ChannelBuzz.ca, and I’ll see you in the channel.

Welcome to The Buzz from ChannelBuzz.ca, I’m Robert Dutt, today is Thursday, May 7, 2026, and here’s what’s happening in the channel today.

WatchGuard Technologies announced yesterday that it has acquired Perimeters.io, marking a significant expansion into identity threat management. According to the company, the deal introduces WatchGuard Cloud Detection and Response, or CloudDR, an AI-first solution built specifically for managed service providers to handle identity threats and shadow AI. The new offering reportedly covers more than forty enterprise applications, including Microsoft 365, OpenAI, and Salesforce.

In a statement, WatchGuard noted that this acquisition is designed to integrate identity threat detection and response, or ITDR, directly into its existing unified security platform. The company is positioning CloudDR as a tool that enables partners to detect anomalous behavior and unauthorized access across distributed cloud environments.

This matters locally because managing SaaS sprawl and unauthorized AI usage is rapidly becoming a primary operational headache for the channel. Integrating these capabilities into an existing platform reduces the need to bolt on disparate security tools. The move allows Canadian partners to protect customer identities and govern AI adoption without adding significant overhead or vendor complexity to their managed security stacks.

Networking startup Meter launched a one hundred million dollar partner fund yesterday, signaling a direct challenge to traditional networking vendors. The company is positioning the fund as a financial mechanism to accelerate channel growth and disrupt established enterprise networking deployments.

According to Meter, the capital is designed to remove the friction of upfront hardware costs for customers while ensuring partners are compensated immediately. Solution providers can leverage the fund to offer customers a pure Networking-as-a-Service model, where Meter owns and manages the hardware, software, and upgrades.

The channel implication here is substantial. Traditional networking deployments often tie up significant customer capital and require solution providers to manage complex hardware refresh cycles. Meter’s approach gives networking-focused partners a compelling commercial argument when competing for mid-market infrastructure deals – shifting client conversations from capital expenditures to predictable operating expenses while preserving their own margin and cash flow.

ServiceNow’s Knowledge 2026 conference in Las Vegas closed its second day of major announcements yesterday, with the company unveiling a joint Autonomous IT solution alongside endpoint intelligence vendor Tanium. The new offering, called ITOM AI Prime powered by Tanium, integrates Tanium’s Autonomous IT Platform with ServiceNow’s IT Operations Management workflows and AI agents.

According to the companies, the integration creates a closed loop between Tanium’s real-time endpoint intelligence and ServiceNow’s workflow orchestration, allowing issues to be detected, resolved, and verified without manual intervention. ServiceNow noted it is already a Tanium customer, with the company stating its 90 percent autonomous Level 1 service desk runs on the platform.

The announcement came alongside Day 2 keynote remarks from ServiceNow president Amit Zavery, who outlined what the company calls its Blueprint for Agentic Business – a platform strategy built around connecting enterprise data, applying governance controls, and enabling AI to act across systems of record. Zavery also confirmed full MCP client connectivity support as part of the company’s Workflow Data Fabric. For channel partners who are building managed services practices around IT automation, the tighter Tanium integration is a signal of where platform-level AI operations are heading.

In Brief

The Global Technology Industry Association has appointed Andrew Allen, Jennifer Baier Anaya, and Jennifer Roy to its board of directors.

NVIDIA and Corning have announced a long-term partnership to strengthen U.S. manufacturing for artificial intelligence infrastructure.

SAP has acquired data management company Dremio and AI startup Prior Labs to build out infrastructure capabilities for enterprise AI initiatives.

Millennium Micro’s Philippe Fortier, director of Quebec and Maritimes, outlined the operational impact of Quebec’s new baseline cybersecurity regulations on managed service providers during a keynote at ITSec 2026.

Apple is reportedly exploring partnerships with Intel and Samsung to manufacture its next generation of device processors.

Full details and links in the show notes or the blog post.

Later today on In The Channel, we go deep on the ServiceNow partner model with the company’s senior vice president of global partnerships and channels, Michael Park – including the mechanics of the 100-day Go Live AI guarantee and what the compression of traditional services work actually means for solution providers.

And if you haven’t heard it yet, yesterday’s episode with Cynomi Chief Evangelist Tim Coach on third-party risk management is worth your time – specifically the recurring revenue opportunity hiding in your clients’ vendor stack.

That’s how we’re seeing the headlines today. I’m Robert Dutt for ChannelBuzz.ca, thanks for listening. Have a great day.

Hello and welcome to In The Channel from ChannelBuzz.ca, bringing news and information to the Canadian IT channel community for the last sixteen years. I’m Robert Dutt, editor of ChannelBuzz.ca, and your host for the show.

A rare double-up on In The Channel today. We’ve already dropped a great interview with Tim Coach from Cynomi on third party risk management. But this is something different altogether. 

This is a what I like to call a Reporter’s Notebook episode – no guest, just me and some thoughts I want to share from my time on the ground at ServiceNow’s Knowledge 2026 conference in Las Vegas. 

Specifically,  I spent about 40 minutes in a room with ServiceNow chairman and CEO Bill McDermott, along with my peers in the indsutry press, in a fireside chat format. You know, I’m always somehow just a tiny bit disappointed when there’s not an actual fireplace. But I digress.

McDermott is one of the most practiced and polished executives in enterprise technology – he knows exactly what he’s doing when he talks to press. But he’s also genuinely quotable in a way that a lot of enterprise CEOs aren’t, and I came out of that session with a few things I wanted to think out loud about.

Fair warning: he spent a meaningful amount of time on the ServiceNow valuation story and the disconnect between where Wall Street has the stock and where he thinks the business is going. I’m going to mostly skip that part. You’re solution providers, not analysts or institutional investors. What I want to talk about is what he said about where the industry is going, because I thought it was worth unpacking.

So. The line that’s stuck with me since I walked out of that room.

“Governance isn’t a feature. It’s the whole ball game.”

That’s the sentence I’d put on the poster if I were running ServiceNow’s marketing right now. And it’s not just a pithy line – it’s the entire strategic argument the company is making, distilled down to nine words.

Here’s the bet McDermott is making, and I think it’s worth understanding because it has real implications for how you think about the next few years of your business.

The first bet is that the AI race isn’t going to be won by the best model. It’s going to be won by whoever can make AI safe enough, governed enough, and deterministic enough to actually run an enterprise on.

He drew a distinction that I thought was clarifying. He said – and I’m quoting – “You can’t have a probabilistic solution for an enterprise. It has to be deterministic and it has to be right every time.”

That’s the core argument against the pure large language model play. An LLM gives you the best answer it can given the data it has. It’s probabilistic by nature. That’s fine for a lot of things. It is not fine when you’re running IT service management for a bank, or HR workflows for a public sector organization, or customer operations for a telco.

ServiceNow’s argument is that the governance layer – what they’re now calling the AI Control Tower – is the thing that makes AI enterprise-safe. Not just a nice add-on. The precondition.

The second bet is that AI isn’t optional. It’s arithmetic.

McDermott came back to this a few times. There’s a projected shortage of 50 million workers globally by 2030. The workforce isn’t growing fast enough to meet demand. Birth rates are declining. The enterprise can’t staff its way out of the problem it’s about to have.

And so the argument isn’t “AI will help you be more efficient.” The argument is “AI is the only answer to a math problem that is already in motion.”

He put it bluntly: AI isn’t coming for your job. AI is coming to do the jobs there won’t be enough people to fill. That’s a different pitch, and for a lot of your customers, it’s a more honest one. Is it a glass-half-full take? Sure. But considering the number of glass-completely-empty takes around AI and what it may do to the workforce of the future, I think it’s worth considering.

The third bet is the one that I find most interesting, and it was stated less explicitly, but I think it’s the most important one for your business.

The bet is that ServiceNow was built for this moment. That the platform that’s been processing workflow for twenty years – the one that already has a hundred billion flows running, most of them untagged and unidentified – was always the foundation that AI needed to land on.

He said it directly at one point: “This platform was always waiting for AI.”

And I think what he’s really saying is: the hard part isn’t the AI. The hard part is knowing what to do with it. Knowing which workflows to activate. Knowing how to govern what you activate. Knowing how to quantify the outcome. And ServiceNow’s argument is that twenty years of enterprise workflow data, and the relationships and trust that come with it, is a moat that a hyperscaler or a pure-play AI company cannot replicate.

There was a moment in the session – a little lighter – where McDermott talked about his relationship with Jensen Huang. He joked that every time he appears on stage with Jensen, NVIDIA’s market cap goes up by about a trillion dollars. He then pointed out that his own company’s multiple hasn’t quite kept pace with that. He was being self-deprecating in the way powerful people can afford to be. But the point underneath it was real: the NVIDIA partnership gives ServiceNow something the pure platform story couldn’t – a direct line into the AI infrastructure conversation, not just the AI governance conversation.

There was one stat he dropped that I’ve been chewing on since then, a statisitical representation of the challenge that he faces, and that you face. And also of the opportunity, for those who play the game wisely.

Only one in ten enterprises, by McDermott’s accounting, have actually moved from AI experimentation into AI that has genuinely impacted a core business process with real agentic workflows.

One in ten.

This is the CEO of the company that just staked its entire conference on the theme of “Welcome to Agentic Business” telling a room full of press that nine out of ten enterprises aren’t there yet. He wasn’t being pessimistic – he was making the case for the runway. But I thought it was an unusually honest thing to say out loud, and it’s worth noting.

Because if one in ten is the number, then for most of your customers, the “agentic business” isn’t something they’re navigating. But it’s probably something they’re aspiring to. And the opportunity for the channel isn’t to tell them about it. It’s to get them there.

And that’s exactly what the Go Live AI guarantee, and the AI Control Tower, and the whole machinery of what ServiceNow announced this week is designed to do. Give the channel a way to close the gap between the aspiration and the reality, at a predictable pace, with a quantifiable outcome. If you want a bit more on the Go Live AI guarantee and the AI Control Tower, we covered it in this morning’s episode of The Buzz, and tune in right here tomorrow, because ServiceNow’s channel leader, Michael Park, has a lot to say about the mechanices of the Go Live AI guarantee in particular.

One last quote I’ll leave you with. Someone in the room asked McDermott how he stays energized given the complexity of everything happening right now. He didn’t hesitate.

“This is the best time I’ve ever seen for innovation in the enterprise.”

He’s a CEO, so you take that with appropriate seasoning. But I was in the room, and I’ll tell you – to me it felt like he meant it.

More from Knowledge 2026 coming this week, so keep your favorite podcast app nearby.

If you’re finding In The Channel useful, please follow or subscribe wherever you’re listening – we’re on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, and most major directories. Ratings and reviews are always welcome.

Until next time, I’m Robert Dutt for ChannelBuzz.ca, and I’ll see you in the channel.

Welcome to The Buzz from ChannelBuzz.ca, I’m Robert Dutt, today is Wednesday, May 6, 2026, and here’s what’s happening in the channel today.

I’m reporting live from Las Vegas, where ServiceNow’s annual Knowledge conference got underway this morning with what may be one of the boldest keynotes I’ve seen at an enterprise software show in years. CEO Bill McDermott took the stage alongside NVIDIA’s Jensen Huang to make a simple but sweeping argument: the AI pilot era is over, and “Agentic Business” — where autonomous AI agents actually do the work — is here now.

The repositioning McDermott is making is significant. ServiceNow is no longer pitching itself as just a workflow platform. It is now positioning itself as the AI Control Tower — the governance layer that sits above all the AI your organization is running, whether it was built on ServiceNow or not. The framing McDermott used was the “AI Blind Spot” — the idea that most organizations are deploying agents without any real visibility into what those agents are actually doing. A live demo on stage showed a real-time prompt injection attack being detected and shut down by the platform. The point was clear: if you don’t have a control layer, you don’t have an AI strategy, you have an AI liability.

The most concrete announcement for the channel is what ServiceNow is calling its “Go Live AI” offer — essentially a total satisfaction guarantee. This is, as far as I know, the first time a major enterprise software company has put a guarantee like this in writing. The commitment is 100 days to production — not a pilot, not a proof of concept — an actual deployed agentic workflow. If you’re a partner trying to move customers off the fence on AI investments, this is a commercial tool. ServiceNow is essentially absorbing some of the delivery risk to help you close.

Jensen Huang’s contribution to the morning was framing the economic case. He pushed back on the idea that AI is purely a cost-cutting play, arguing instead that enterprises should be using AI to “elevate ambition” — to do things they couldn’t do at all before, not just do existing things cheaper. The NVIDIA partnership is powering a new layer ServiceNow is calling the AI Factory, which provides the compute and model infrastructure underneath the platform’s agentic layer.

The most vivid demo of the morning came from FedEx CEO Raj Subramaniam, who walked through a live scenario showing ServiceNow’s new AI agent — called Otto — solving a staffing gap at a FedEx distribution hub in real time. The gap that historically took three days to resolve was closed in minutes. FedEx reported 2,000 incidents offloaded, over 3,000 hours saved, and 85 percent accuracy. Those are the kinds of numbers that end the “pilot conversation” fast.

For Canadian solution providers, the takeaway is this: ServiceNow is giving the channel two new tools. A governance platform to make AI deployments defensible, and a commercial guarantee to make those deployments sellable. I’ll have more on what this means for Canadian partners specifically in my In The Channel interviews from the show later this week.

And there was plenty going on aside from here at Knwoledge 26. In brief today: 

First, New research from Zoho highlights a “false comfort zone” for Canadian workforce security, with local attack rates sitting at 30 percent. While 89 percent of Canadians believe AI will strengthen their security, only 46 percent are ready to deploy it due to legacy infrastructure bottlenecks.

Second, Syncro and Guardz have announced a major partnership, embedding the Guardz cybersecurity platform directly into the Syncro MSP workflow. The integration includes automated client invoicing through Syncro’s Universal Billing to help MSPs capture security margin without the reconciliation headache.

Third, Huntress distribution deals are now officially live with partners like Ingram Micro, Vertosoft, and Liquid PC. For the Canadian channel, the Ingram Micro relationship is the headline, signaling Huntress’s move to scale beyond its MSP roots into the broader mid-market.

And finally, Kiteworks has appointed 17-year Oracle veteran Julia Rasekhi as its new SVP of Strategic Partnerships. This newly created role is a clear signal that the content governance player is shifting toward an aggressive, partner-led growth strategy in regulated markets.

Full details and links in the show notes or the blog post.

Later today on In The Channel, we take a look at third-party risk management, and why it’s both an opportunity for managed service providers, and a threat as insurance providers get serious about supply chain risk, with Tim Coach from Cynomi.

And if you haven’t heard it yet, check out yesterday’s episode with Frances Edmonds, HP Canada’s sustabiility leader, on just how important sustainability is on Canadian procurement documents.

That’s how we’re seeing the headlines today. I’m Robert Dutt for ChannelBuzz.ca, thanks for listening. Have a great day.

Robert Dutt: Hello and welcome to In The Channel from ChannelBuzz.ca, bringing news and information to the Canadian IT channel community for the last sixteen years. I’m Robert Dutt, editor of ChannelBuzz.ca, and your host for the show.

We talk a lot on this show about the “how” of the channel — how to build a practice, how to manage a migration, how to secure a client. Today we’re looking at a different kind of how: how to win deals in an environment where your customers care as much about your carbon footprint as they do about your hourly rate.

My guest today has been living this story for 30 years. Frances Edmonds is the Head of Sustainable Impact at HP Canada, and she’s one of the most recognized voices in the country when it comes to the intersection of technology and sustainability. HP’s own data shows that over 70% of partners who lead with sustainability are seeing measurable impact on their win rates.

What does that actually look like for a Canadian MSP in 2026? We’re going to dig into the shift in procurement rules, including some hard numbers on ESG weighting in Canadian bid documents, and why the rise of Edge AI might actually be the biggest sustainability story of the year for the channel.

Let’s get right into it — my chat with Frances Edmonds.

Frances, thanks for taking the time.

Frances Edmonds: You’re very welcome.

Robert Dutt: You sit in a unique place in that you’ve been focused on sustainability for a while now — long before it was a mainstream business conversation. Can you give us the quick picture of what your role is at HP Canada today, and how that has evolved as the story has evolved over time?

Frances Edmonds: Sure. My title today is Head of Sustainable Impact — that’s the name of our sustainability program. And I practice what I call CSR 2.0: corporate social responsibility 2.0.

I spent the first half of my career really getting HP Canada to the point where we could call ourselves Canada’s most sustainable technology company — you can find all the proof of that at hp.ca/sustainableimpact. Then we took a look around and said: sustainability from a business context in Canada isn’t really advancing. We’ve got a few leaders, but the vast majority of Canadian businesses aren’t doing very much — including our channel.

So we thought: how do we change that? In a capitalist economy, the demand signal for sustainability performance in suppliers comes at the ballot box of procurement. About eight years ago, we switched our strategy to focus on how do we change how Canada buys. That’s really my job today — to encourage everyone in the industrial economy to add sustainability into their procurement criteria and decision-making, so there’s an incentive for all companies to step up and do more.

Robert Dutt: Is that all?

Frances Edmonds: [laughs] Well, on top of all the other things we do to maintain being Canada’s most sustainable technology company. But I don’t do this alone — sustainability is a team sport. We require all players to come to the table and bring their relative strengths.

One thing we’re doing right now: we’re onto our fourth cohort working with a nonprofit called CBSR, Canadian Business for Social Responsibility. We teach sustainability professionals at some of Canada’s largest companies — Walmart, Canadian Tire, the banks, insurance companies — how to work alongside their procurement teams to implement sustainable procurement. We partner with nonprofits like Green Economy Canada, CBSR, other industry associations, and customers and partners to drive the change that’s necessary.

Robert Dutt: You mentioned there’s still a need to mature how organizations across Canada are approaching this. The Amplify Impact data shows that 70-plus percent of partners report winning new business by leading with sustainability — that’s a striking number. When a Canadian MSP or reseller is actually leading with sustainability in a sales conversation, what does that look like in the room?

Frances Edmonds: It really depends on who the customer is. Some customers have sustainability goals, but the people the MSP is actually talking to don’t know that — there’s often a gap between what the corporation is committed to and what the people doing the buying or the IT implementation are aware of.

So you have to do your research: understand where the customer is coming from, what the opportunity is, and then align what the MSP and the OEM are doing on sustainability with the customer’s actual pain points. Do they have difficulty managing products at end of first life — the most common issue? Do they understand where their security vulnerabilities are?

If you think about managing print, for instance — you’d normally do a print assessment and find printers 15 or 20 years old sitting on the network. That’s a huge security vulnerability that nobody’s really paying attention to. Helping customers with pain points like that — showing them the opportunities, whether it’s getting value back from end-of-first-life equipment to help fund new purchases, or moving into buying as a service — that’s really the sweet spot for both an MSP and a customer to maximize their sustainability performance.

Robert Dutt: Is this primarily a large enterprise and government discussion today, or is it moving into the mid-market and down into SMB? A lot of partners are working with smaller businesses who may not have a strong sustainability mandate at the top of their priority list.

Frances Edmonds: I think it’s quite spotty, honestly — I see bid documents from across the country in all sectors of the economy, so it’s hard to generalize.

One advantage small businesses have is that they’re often purpose-driven, and the owner can make a decision quickly. “I’m buying from a company that puts ocean-bound plastics into their products” — and that’s a faster decision than getting a university to change its procurement policy, which can take three years of approvals.

What I am seeing that’s changed over the eight years I’ve been working in this area: before, people didn’t really understand the link between sustainability and procurement. Today they understand it, and the people who want to do it differently often just have inhibitors in the way — or they default to “this product’s carbon footprint is two kilograms less, so I’ll buy it.” That’s not really how sustainable procurement works. You need more information to make a well-rounded decision.

Sustainable procurement is still about getting the best value for the goods and services you’re buying — but now you’re also looking at the most sustainable or circular option from the most sustainable or circular supplier, in alignment with your own organization’s goals. And governments, whose sustainability goals range from zero poverty to life below water and everything in between, have a tremendous opportunity to practice this.

Robert Dutt: You’ve spoken before about sustainability scoring in RFPs and procurement documents. Where does that stand in Canada right now — is this something MSPs need to be ready for today, or is it still a coming wave?

Frances Edmonds: There’s always opportunity for competitive advantage because each customer has a different focus — whether it’s bridging the digital divide in Indigenous communities, disability inclusion, or a dozen other areas.

But let me give you some numbers. The Canadian Collaboration for Sustainable Procurement just issued their latest annual report. They represent broader public sector organizations with $105 billion in combined spend. Twenty-seven members have sustainable procurement embedded in their policies. Fourteen have a dedicated full-time person working on it.

And one of the best examples to date: OECM, the Ontario Education Collaborative Marketplace, publicly states that they’re applying a 12% weighting for environmental, social, and governance items in bid documents — scored at not just the OEM level, but at the channel partner level as well.

Robert Dutt: So if I’m a partner who wants to get ahead of this — with so many angles and approaches to consider — what’s the minimum literacy they need to have in a procurement conversation today? What should they know cold?

Frances Edmonds: The universal language is carbon. What are your carbon emissions? How are you working to reduce your carbon impact? That question is coming in some form from customers, regardless of sector.

We know our products are carbon-intensive: 80% of a notebook computer’s carbon impact is determined before it ever reaches the customer — it’s in how it’s built. So understanding where carbon sits in the system, and how customers can help reduce it, is the first place to start.

Through the Amplify Impact Program, HP offers a wide range of training — from basic 101s all the way through to what we call Climate Fresk. That’s a three-hour workshop that helps a group understand the interconnectedness of climate change and what they can do about it. We deliver it to partner leadership so they can understand how important this is to their business. We’re actually running one next week, and partners are welcome to attend.

Robert Dutt: For a partner who’s hearing this and thinking “I’m interested, but where do I start?” — what are the tools and resources inside Amplify Impact that are actually moving the needle?

Frances Edmonds: The Amplify Impact Program basically took 80 years of HP’s expertise in sustainability leadership, put it into a web-enabled system, and made it available to partners for free. Everything a partner could possibly need is in there.

If you’re not in the program yet, I’d strongly encourage you to join — it’s free and straightforward to get started. You sign a pledge to commit to the program, then complete an online self-assessment. With AI enhancements, it benchmarks you against your peers worldwide and gives you a customized action plan to improve your scores.

The results have been meaningful: since we launched in 2021, self-assessment scores globally have increased by 59%. Partners redo the assessment annually, and we’re seeing steady progress. In Canada specifically, we’ve seen over 6,000 sustainability courses completed by partners and employees — which tells you the interest is there at the individual level.

For anyone outside the Amplify Impact Program, Dr. Bob Willard at Sustainability Advantage offers a whole suite of high-quality tools for free. That’s another strong place to start.

Robert Dutt: How has the partner conversation in Canada on this evolved over the last five years, and where does it need to go next?

Frances Edmonds: Let’s look at the economic situation partners are in today. Prices are going through the roof, availability is constrained. What does a logical customer do in those circumstances? They start thinking about buying for durability and longevity — and that leads right into the “as a service” conversation.

This is about deepening relationships with your customers. Customers don’t want a one-time fix anymore — they need a partner at the table. And selling as a service, with a longer and deeper customer relationship, is where the market is going. We’re moving away from selling boxes to selling services, and sustainability is just another one of those services that’s part and parcel of that shift.

I always think of security and sustainability as two sides of the same coin. That’s what customers need — and we can deliver both.

Robert Dutt: Security as a service is certainly well-established. Where do you see sustainability as a service in terms of maturity and adoption?

Frances Edmonds: Within the Amplify Impact Program, for instance, if a partner wants to measure and manage their carbon footprint, HP has negotiated a globally discounted rate for partners to acquire a software-as-a-service tool to do exactly that. They become carbon-literate in a hands-on way and understand how to report on it to their own stakeholders — employees, investors, customers, whoever.

In some cases, we even allow partners to use MDF to pay for that software. We’re essentially paying them to get started with carbon management.

Robert Dutt: I have to ask about AI — it’s the conversation everyone in the channel is having right now. There’s a real tension between the push to build AI infrastructure, which is enormously energy-intensive, and sustainability goals. How should partners be navigating that for their clients?

Frances Edmonds: Great question. Let’s start with the distinction between cloud AI and Edge AI.

Edge AI — which, in a country of small and medium businesses like Canada, is where AI is really going to drive productivity — is estimated to have greater than 90% lower carbon impact and to be more secure than cloud AI. So we’re already on a winner there, assuming we can get AI-enabled devices into the right businesses.

At its simplest: most tech people don’t actually know the relative carbon footprint of doing a Google search versus running a generative AI query. Can we just educate people to use the right tool in the right place? Don’t burn your carbon budget on something where a Google search would do.

When you get into the ethics of AI use broadly, that’s a much longer conversation — and I’d like to see a lot more guidance documentation coming out on that front.

Robert Dutt: That’s quite telling — that much lower footprint at the edge also speaks to what solution providers control, and brings in data sovereignty, security, many different factors.

Frances Edmonds: Exactly. Security is the other piece — and they really go hand in hand.

Robert Dutt: One last question: what’s the one thing you wish more MSPs and resellers understood about sustainability that they’re currently either getting wrong or overlooking?

Frances Edmonds: Even when partners have made real investments in becoming more sustainable — gone through the training, completed the program — I don’t think they’re maximizing that return on investment by actually selling with sustainability. And I think it often comes down to the people taking the education not being the people making the go-to-market decisions.

But as we see this shift into selling as a service, I think it will come along with it naturally. If you think about WXP — HP’s Workforce Experience Platform — there’s sustainability built right into it alongside security. The opportunity to delight customers with sustainability is real, and it’s not hard to do. It’s really just about making sure everyone knows, understands, and can connect it to what the customer actually needs.

Robert Dutt: Some great advice in there. I appreciate you taking the time to share where things stand and where you see them going.

Frances Edmonds: Thank you. From Canada’s most sustainable technology company — listed as one of the top 100 most sustainable corporations worldwide — this is near and dear to my heart. We’re here to make a difference, and this is one of the ways we do that.

Robert Dutt: Brilliant. And it’s a conversation HP Canada has been having consistently for a while now — so it’s clearly not just an Earth Month thing.

There you have it — Frances Edmonds from HP Canada.

I’d like to thank Frances for her time today. It’s rare to talk to someone who can bridge the gap between high-level environmental goals and the gritty reality of a municipal RFP response, and I think she gave us some real clarity on where that line is being drawn right now.

And as always, I’d like to thank you for listening.

My big takeaway from that conversation is that sustainability is becoming a hard technical requirement, much like security. When you hear that organizations like OECM are moving toward a 12% weighting for ESG in their procurement documents — that’s not a nice-to-have anymore. That’s a gating factor. If you’re an MSP and you aren’t literate in this space, you’re essentially spotting your competitors a 12-point lead before the conversation even starts.

I also found Frances’s point about Edge AI particularly striking. The idea that processing at the edge carries 90% less carbon impact than the cloud is a powerful narrative for partners — especially when you layer in the data sovereignty benefits we discussed. It’s a rare triple-win of performance, privacy, and planet that fits perfectly into the AI PC refresh cycle we’re seeing right now.

If you enjoyed this episode, please make sure to follow or subscribe to In The Channel on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your shows. Ratings and reviews are always hugely appreciated — they really do help other Canadian channel pros find the show.

Until next time, I’m Robert Dutt for ChannelBuzz.ca, and I’ll see you in the channel.

TRANSCRIPT TO COME

Robert Dutt: Hello, and welcome to In The Channel from ChannelBuzz.ca, bringing news and information to the Canadian IT channel community for the last 16 years. I’m Robert Dutt, editor of ChannelBuzz.ca, and your host for the show.

This is our third and final episode from last week’s SAS Innovate 2026 in Grapevine, Texas. And if you’ve been following along, you’ve heard the view from SAS Canada leadership – the AI maturity story, the governance urgency, what the mid-market channel opportunity looks like – and then the global channel strategy conversation with John Carey, the build-out of the indirect motion, the TD SYNNEX partnership, and where the channel goes from here. What we haven’t heard yet is what it actually looks like from inside a real enterprise engagement. That’s what this episode is.

My guest is Nat D’Ercole, data transformation leader for AI and data at Deloitte Canada. Deloitte is one of SAS’s major global systems integrator partners, and Nat works with the kind of large Canadian enterprises that are right in the middle of the AI transformation conversation – Viya migrations, data governance strategy, OSFI E-21 readiness, risk and fraud modernization. The practitioner reality, not the roadmap.

We talk about what it actually looks like to walk into a client and untangle 20 or 30 years of SAS implementation. We get into data governance maturity as the thing that most determines whether an organization is ready for AI. We talk about what Nat calls human hallucination, and why it’s not as different from the AI kind as you might think. And we close on a concept that Nat has been waiting 30 years to see become real – the 80/20 flip.

Let’s get right into it. My chat with Nat D’Ercole.

Nat, thanks for taking the time. I appreciate it.

Nat D’Ercole: Pleasure to be here.

Robert Dutt: Obviously, you guys are one of SAS’s major global partners, but for an audience that’s primarily VARs and MSPs – that kind of partner – the Deloitte AI and data practice might be a bit of a black box. Can you tell us a bit about what it looks like day to day? Who are your clients? What are they typically asking you to solve today?

Nat D’Ercole: Of course. Our clients are facing complex issues in terms of how to manage their data, manage their models, and obviously working in an age of AI and sorting all that out in terms of where they are today, what are they using today, the cost of running all that today, to where they need to get to – both from a data, tech, people, and process perspective. So being a professional services firm focused on helping our clients with both advisory, implementation, and supporting our clients’ systems are key areas that our clients look to us for support.

Robert Dutt: A little earlier, I talked with Ryan Macdonald, who leads SAS Canada. The subject of hidden SAS came up – in so much as a lot of customers end up finding they’re running SAS software, running key business functions on SAS software, and not necessarily even aware of it, because it’s just become such a part of the underpinnings. It’s just there. It’s invisible even to themselves. When you walk into a client that engages Deloitte on, say, a Viya migration, is that something that you often see? And what does that journey kind of look like?

Nat D’Ercole: Great question, Robert. And that comment from Ryan really makes sense to me. Our clients have been using SAS for many, many years – some 20, 30 years, and maybe even longer. And so SAS is used for everything from data management, modeling, analytics, reporting, data wrangling, and so on and so forth. And it’s a web of solutions that organizations across departments have implemented. And so understanding what they currently have in place is a challenge. And so we do help them with that in terms of providing them with a scan of their current environment and helping them understand what workloads are actually running their business versus workloads that haven’t been touched in years. And with that, we’re able to help them with a roadmap to address those workloads and determine what is fit for purpose in terms of moving to a future state.

Robert Dutt: You guys are dealing with big projects and pretty high-stakes stuff, and not the simplest thing – like a Viya migration at enterprise scale is clearly not a simple concept. What do you see as the real cost and complexity pressure points for customers? And how do you help clients navigate those without the project stalling out?

Nat D’Ercole: You know, I think what’s really important is to understand – just building on my previous answer – understanding what is running their business and the cost structure associated to that. So obviously there’s technology licensing, there’s training on existing solutions, target solutions, change management, upskilling, etc. in terms of some of the key cost drivers. And let’s also refer to storage as well as another area of cost. So analyzing our clients’ environments and really taking a closer look at each of those buckets to help them figure out where are they now, and what are the opportunities, what are the options for them moving forward.

Robert Dutt: Governance – obviously a big topic here – and the idea of governance and trust becoming inseparable from the AI conversation has been a big theme here and elsewhere. Curiously, what are you seeing in that, and is it changing what you’re being hired to do? Are clients coming to you with a technology problem, or are they coming to you with a governance and risk problem that has a technology component to it?

Nat D’Ercole: Yeah, so clients are hiring us to solve a business problem that is enabled by technology, enabled by change. And to address your specific question around governance – governance comes in the form of data governance, AI governance, model governance, etc. We do find that the level of preparedness in organizations around data absolutely varies from immature to mature. So those organizations that have addressed data governance are those that are most prepared for the AI age and being able to take the next step.

Now, not everything requires structured data and highly clean data. So depending on the use cases, it is quite possible to apply AI and begin to see benefit. However, more and more I do see organizations invest in things like master data management, invest in data governance, and invest in operating models. And those operating models are also AI-ready. So we’re starting to see the need for roles such as prompt engineers, AI engineers that are interrogating results of models, ensuring that there’s a continuous feedback loop – and where models are drifting or hallucinating or so on and so forth, that there’s a human loop catching that. So these are new roles that are being created and need to be part of an overall governance strategy.

Robert Dutt: What role do you see yourselves playing in leveling up those organizations who haven’t gone far enough in governance thus far to get the most out of the AI future?

Nat D’Ercole: I’m actually working with a client right now where they haven’t addressed data governance and they’re stuck with legacy solutions where very much it’s been the wild wild west – if I could use that term – in terms of accessing data, enabling analysts across the organization to wrangle that data and develop outputs that their leaders consume. And so when that happens without governance, you get things like what I refer to sometimes as human hallucination, where there’s multiple versions of the truth. Organizations do see that today. And to me, that’s the human side of these hallucinations that we’re seeing with AI.

So for those organizations, in terms of leveling up, it is certainly approaching it from a people perspective first – ensuring leadership is in place, necessary roles around domain ownership, necessary standards and policies are in place. And really, what is the motivation for elevating data governance in the organization, ensuring that that messaging is clear from the executive level down.

Robert Dutt: So if human-in-the-loop is the solution to AI hallucinations, is AI-in-the-loop the solution to human hallucinations? Just kidding. Moving on to the regulatory environment – first thing that comes to mind, especially because SAS is so big in regulated industries, is finance and OSFI E-21 in particular. When you’re working with organizations that have to meet that bar, do you see it creating real urgency in the conversations you’re having? Or are clients still finding ways to buy time or building out how they respond to some of the regulations that we see?

Nat D’Ercole: Well, there’s nothing like having a catalyst in place to motivate – exactly. So yeah, I think that’s where regulation provides guidance, direction, standards. These are areas that organizations can look to in order to inform how they need to move forward as well. So that’s very much welcome, I would say, in terms of helping organizations steer their investments so that obviously they comply – and no one wants to be facing penalties.

Robert Dutt: Sticking with financial services – risk and fraud is highlighted as an area of strength for the Deloitte/SAS partnership. Where are you seeing the most active investment and I guess the most interesting use cases right now?

Nat D’Ercole: I would say in terms of risk and fraud, procurement integrity are areas that are horizontal across organizations. You can go from a fraud perspective – not just procurement, but other types of fraud within organizations. And then from a risk perspective, there are areas around financial risk where organizations need to ensure that they have proper scenario modeling in place to understand what stresses they need to address from an organization and modeling perspective. So I would say those are common use cases – asset liability management, treasury – just being more versatile, more accelerated in terms of running these scenarios. So solutions like SAS do provide capabilities to address that speed of process.

Robert Dutt: In general terms, as you’ve been here this week at the event – whether it’s a specific announcement, whether it’s an area of conversation, whether it’s what the leadership at SAS is thinking about – what’s caught your eye, caught your ear, and made you think, “Oh, I need to learn more about that”? What’s been your headline of the event?

Nat D’Ercole: The keynote – the interview that Jen Chase did with Mel Robins really hit home for me, and how she applied it to AI. And for me, ensuring that leaders are leaning in and providing the change that they want – or being the change that they want to see in the organization, living the change – and also helping organizations from a leadership perspective, executive perspective, to be comfortable. Many employees, I would say, across industries and organizations – some as Mel referred to – are afraid of what AI’s potential can do to their jobs. That’s a real human reaction. And so from a leadership perspective, creating the right environment for people to begin to lean in. I’ve said many times that, “Will your job be replaced?” – and oftentimes the answer to that is, “Yes, it’ll be replaced by those folks that are embracing AI.” So now is the time to lean in and begin to learn how to use it. So Mel’s comments definitely resonated. I looked around a large room – over probably 300 tables – and many people nodded with some of those remarks. So for me, that really resonated.

Robert Dutt: Pulling on that leadership thread a little bit – from where you’re sitting, what does good leadership look like in terms of guiding that AI discussion? Because that can be everything from really understanding it, making the case for it, making clear communications – not pushing, but being behind the organization’s efforts – to the kind of stereotypical thou-shalt-from-on-high, “The board tells me I have to do AI. Everyone’s talking about AI, make it happen.”

Nat D’Ercole: I think from an executive perspective, beginning to make investments in AI and ensuring that there’s a path forward for the organization – as individuals, departments, and then the enterprise. So that path forward, typically when we work with clients, we look to understand where the low-hanging fruit might be, both from an efficiency perspective and effectiveness. By effectiveness, being able to get insights faster, being able to run through processes faster, but at the same time ensuring – back to our previous comment – ensuring that the human is in the loop. Executives are also looking for ROI in use cases. And I would say that ROI should be looked at most definitely, but be somewhat lenient in terms of the payback timeframe. Some may be one year, some may be two years. The important thing is to start and begin to learn from the experiences, and have a set of – or journey roadmap of – use cases that will enable the organization to be more efficiently effective as a whole.

Robert Dutt: One of the bigger announcements here – and certainly the ones that got a lot of the attention and a lot of stage time – was SAS AI Navigator, built around governing AI use cases, models, and agents all at scale. Does a tool like that change what you guys deliver, or does it slot into something you’ve already been building? Does it kind of augment manual processes for you?

Nat D’Ercole: Yes, I would say it complements our trusted AI framework. I really like the visuals around the AI Navigator, and it really showed how AI could be green, could be yellow, and then could be red – and then ensuring that there’s a human loop addressing those red drift areas. So it certainly complements. And knowing how to bring the two together is, I would say, areas where clients will need help, and certainly what to prioritize first.

Robert Dutt: In talking to Ryan, the idea of clients increasingly looking at engagements that involve the scale of a GSI such as yourselves alongside niche industry-specific partners in the same engagement – and kind of creating that ecosystem approach. Curious if that’s something that you’re seeing and building for, or still more of an exception than rule in Canada.

Nat D’Ercole: I would say, going back to a previous question, we do lead from a business perspective and clients are coming to us to ensure that the technology investments that they are making make sense from an overall business perspective. And so how those investments are realized, we will often be an orchestrator of our alliances – both technology alliances and potentially industry-specific – where there’s expertise that we need to pull in as part of solutioning for our clients. So not abnormal, I would say. Where it’s justified, certainly our ecosystems and alliances are a key value driver for our success.

Robert Dutt: What’s the common genesis of that? I’m curious how often it’s you guys pulling in another party because they add something to the engagement, versus customers having an incumbent or someone they want to work with alongside you. How does that start, basically?

Nat D’Ercole: It really starts with having the conversation with the client – what are they thinking, and how can we help them best, bringing the best resources and capabilities to their problems. Clients may also have biases in terms of what they’re comfortable with. So it’s understanding that and advising them on whether that makes sense or doesn’t, and why.

Robert Dutt: Let’s get meta with AI a little bit here. There’s a lot of conversation in consulting about using AI to deliver AI projects faster. Is that something that you guys are doing in this practice? And what does it look like if it is?

Nat D’Ercole: Oh, absolutely, Rob. These are demands that our clients are requesting – that whenever there’s any engineering in place, whether it’s custom engineering or custom build solutions, custom build models, what have you, or migrations for that matter – migrating from legacy code, legacy reporting solutions, legacy SAS to SAS Viya, etc. – leveraging AI to accelerate time to value, lower the cost of delivering. And so to that end, we have developed accelerators. We do leverage AI and AI-assisted development engineering – AI-augmented engineering, if you will – to deliver overall lower total cost of implementation.

Robert Dutt: What does the team that you’re building to do this work in Canada look like? I’m curious especially what the skills you’re most looking for are, and what are the skills that are hardest to find or most need to be developed because they’re brand new.

Nat D’Ercole: Certainly data scientists, engineers, domain expertise in an industry that understands the business problems, understands the business language, change management – these are core consulting skills. I would say it just gets further augmented in the area of AI, and ensuring that resources have or are building experience or getting upskilled in the areas of AI to solution our clients’ problems. So I would say those are the key areas. And the last one is that trusted AI area as well – where our risk practice is focused on that. So from overall servicing a client, being able to pull from all facets of our multidisciplinary capabilities across the firm are key aspects in terms of why clients are coming to us to support them, because it’s not a technology problem.

Robert Dutt: Last one for me – what does success look like for a Canadian organization that’s, let’s say, 18 months into this kind of a transformation? And what’s the one thing that most often determines whether they get to success or not with an AI project?

Nat D’Ercole: I would say having clearly defined upfront business rationale – what does the future state look like from a business economics perspective? I’m not just talking about financial return. I’m talking about what does it mean for their people, and being able to sell that. Having that vision in place and actively working to chip away at building that out with the organization, within the organization – upskilling them so that they have the necessary skill sets to move forward, take on more themselves, et cetera.

So you definitely need to have the persistence, the top-level leadership to continue to drive, and I would say celebrate successes, advocate for better ways of working, and the benefits that it’s driving for the organization. So just continuing to sell the benefits, continuing to provide that vision for employees so that they understand what this means for them as they move forward. Those use cases where AI is replacing just the redundant tasks that employees are working on to get a report out – these are all areas where AI can improve the efficiencies, improve the quality, improve the trust, so that employees can focus on those higher-order, higher-value areas, strategic thinking – things that they’ve been hired to do.

I’ve been in this business for over 30 years and there’s always been that 80% of the time people are pushing data around, preparing data, and 20% is being spent on value-added activities. So AI really provides now the opportunity to flip that – finally. But obviously it does require safeguards, it does require executive support and leadership. So yeah, it’s a great time to be in, to be consulting, and to be working with clients to help them realize better ways of working.

Robert Dutt: All right. Well, good luck in making that flip. It is a long time coming, as you say. I hope Innovate finishes strong for you, and thanks again for taking the time.

Nat D’Ercole: Thank you, Robert.

Robert Dutt: There you have it – Nat D’Ercole from Deloitte Canada. I’d like to thank Nat for his time, and that wraps up our three-episode run from SAS Innovate 2026. Thanks for listening.

Few things I’m taking away from this one. First, the human hallucination concept. When organizations haven’t addressed data governance, you end up with multiple versions of the truth – different teams, different numbers, different answers to the same question. Nat’s point is that this is the human-side equivalent of what we’re trying to prevent with AI governance, and that the organizations that have already solved the data governance problem are the ones that are actually ready for AI. Not the ones with the best AI strategy – the ones with the cleanest data foundation.

Second, the 80/20 flip. Nat’s been in this business for over 30 years. For most of that time, people have spent 80% of their time pushing data around and 20% actually doing value-added work. AI has the potential to flip that. That’s not a new observation, but hearing it from someone who’s been watching it not happen for three decades really gives it some weight.

And third, Deloitte positioning as the orchestrator. They’re not just the big GSI anchor in these deals. They’re the ones pulling in niche specialists, aligning technology alliances, and making sure the business case holds together across all of it. That ecosystem John Carey described from the vendor side – this is what it looks like from the delivery side.

Hope you enjoyed this special coverage from SAS Innovate 2026. As fate would have it, we’ll have a new series starting later this week – more on that to come, but safe to say I’m currently on my way to Las Vegas.

If you found this one useful, follow or subscribe to the ChannelBuzz.ca podcast. We’re on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, and most of the major directories. Ratings and reviews are greatly appreciated and really help others in the channel find the show.

Until next time, I’m Robert Dutt for ChannelBuzz.ca, and I’ll see you in the channel.

Robert Dutt: Hello, and welcome to In The Channel from ChannelBuzz.ca, bringing news and information to the Canadian IT channel community for the last 16 years. I’m Robert Dutt, editor of ChannelBuzz.ca, and your host for the show.

Still coming to you this week from Grapevine, Texas, from SAS Innovate 2026. If you caught our last episode with Ryan Macdonald, leader of SAS Canada, you heard the view from the Canadian perspective: the AI maturity story, OSFI E-21, and the mid-market channel opportunity. This time I’m going a level up.

My guest today is John Carey, senior vice president of global channels at SAS Institute. John’s about four years into the role, and he came in with a specific mandate: to rethink what partnering looks like for a company with a long history of advisory and delivery through partners, but limited co-sell and essentially no resale motion. Four years later, the picture looks pretty different. There’s a clear market segmentation model, a distribution partnership with TD SYNNEX, an active project underway right now to migrate direct customers to indirect, and a 30% channel revenue target that’s already evolving into something even more ambitious.

We talk about all of it: what he found when he arrived, how the direct-to-indirect transition is actually landing with customers, what the partner economics look like for a new SAS partner in 2026, how this week’s AI Navigator and agentic AI announcements change the channel opportunity, and what he thinks the SAS channel looks like in three years if things go well.

Let’s get right into it. My chat with John Carey.

John, thanks for taking the time. I appreciate it.

John Carey: Appreciate it. Good to be here, Robert.

Robert Dutt: You’re about four years into leading channels for SAS if memory serves and I’m able to do the math—both of which are somewhat suspect. Can you tell me a little bit about what you found when you got here and the quick version of the journey in building the channel from your point of view?

John Carey: Got it. Well, first of all, you absolutely did get it right. It is, come June, four years since I joined SAS. Now, the first thing—I was brought in by the ELT, with an ELT remit to rethink partnering for SAS’s future. So we had a history of partnering. If you think about where SAS came from, a lot of advisory engagement, a lot of delivery through partners, but not necessarily a lot of co-sell and certainly no resell.

So one of the remits coming in was to assess the business, understand what the opportunities were, and build a program that allows us to create a growing business that is driven by partners and owned by partners. And we get the acceleration and the leverage of the partner community that all software vendors are seeking and hope to take advantage of.

When I came in, I would say we lacked maturity in our partnering in some areas. We were definitely mercurial in a way that wasn’t helpful. Partners didn’t have consistency, and we weren’t persistent in holding ourselves and our partners accountable. There was a lot of, “If only… it’s not me, it’s them.”

So phase one: get to a single source of truth. So we introduced undisputed channel revenue. Let’s agree and measure together the value of the channel in our business. The other thing we did is we segmented, for the first time, our market. We had historically looked at our install base as a quadrant, an ABCD, thinking about propensity for growth and saturation. And we moved to the more traditional pyramid, but with a binary segmentation. So above the line: enterprise; below the line: channel.

And that allowed us to prioritize routes to market. So in the enterprise, it’s very much a co-sell partner delivery model. GSIs are a very strong focus. Technology partners are a very strong focus up there. And then certain regional boutique consulting partners continue to be high value, particularly in our vertical industries—FSI, public sector, life sciences.

Below the line, the story was: how do we give this business to the partners, give partners autonomy, and allow them to determine their own future? So that was really about taking business that was historically direct and making it indirect. Actually, this year, we have a whole project where we are moving our channel direct install base to indirect. So, communicating with the customer about why it’s good for them, communicating to the partner of what they need to do to be ready, and then putting that fuel into an engine that we’ve been building over the last few years with partners with strong SAS skills, but who were traditionally services partners and have had to build something of a resale muscle.

We’re also starting to recruit some more traditional high-powered solution providers, as well as really focusing on managed service provider opportunities with partners who not only can sell the solution, but they host and operate the solution for the customer. And the nexus of this was finding ways to bring the enterprise value of SAS to the non-enterprise client base, and to do that through our local superpower, which is our partner community who understand those customers and their pain points in a way that we just don’t have the resources to do, and to make sure they’re empowered with the kind of tools and the right cost structure to be able to give that enterprise value at a non-enterprise price point.

Robert Dutt: How has that direct-to-indirect transition gone? How does that land with customers? It’s got to be a bit of a communication challenge because you want to make sure you’re not positioning it as “we’re stepping away from you,” even if you’re introducing a partner into the mix.

John Carey: Yeah. So this is what we’re going through right now. So first of all, there’s the angst as a vendor of saying, “I’m about to go to a customer and say our transactional relationship is going to change.” But really, our contractual relationship remains intact. The contract between the end user and the vendor stays in place. We are responsible for delivering on the value of the platform or the solution provided.

What we’re doing is we’re rerouting the transaction through a partner, which means we can support more currencies. We can support different pricing conditions and payment terms that, as an enterprise, we’re just not able to entertain for anyone but the largest customers. And so our positioning is: it gives our customers far more flexibility and more intimate engagement than being part of a long tail of customers for a large enterprise that end up in this pool that you call “programmatic”—which we all use the words, but none of us like those words. And a way of avoiding that is to say, “This isn’t programmatic. This is channel-managed,” because this is where the partners are stepping in to make sure that that customer feels like the most important customer of that partner, rather than the not-most-important customer of a large vendor.

Robert Dutt: Can you tell me a little bit more about the managed services motion and how you see that evolving, especially as SAS overall has become much more open in terms of the whole structure there—getting into MCP and acknowledging that a lot of times customers are going to be consuming SAS’s insights and abilities through the chatbots and other channels, for want of a better word?

John Carey: Well, look, first of all, I’ve certainly lived through enough inflection points to recognize one as it comes along. And this is an inflection point where there’s opportunity and risk. When I think about the philosophy from the channel, certainly with channel customers, I want those customers hosted by partners. Why? Because a big part of their TCO challenge is just giving them access to software doesn’t mean they can afford the resources to operate and maximize return on that software.

If they can be supported by a managed service provider, by a solution provider who’s hosting on their behalf, now they have access to actual educated, certified SAS resources who are dedicated to making sure they maximize the return on that investment. And so with that underpinning, you then think about the integration of the chatbots—the Anthropic’s, Copilot, Gemini integration. It’s pretty scary for mid-sized customers to be thinking about this. I mean, do most people know that if you put your data up on those things that it’s no longer privileged? Do most people know that there’s an element here which feels like social media, that we’ve since learned who’s being monetized here? This feels free, but actually I’m feeding this model all of my proprietary data to get a presumed efficiency which may or may not turn up, in the hope that it doesn’t hallucinate.

Well, when I look at that and I think about SAS making data ready for the AI lifecycle, SAS having a governance infrastructure that allows us to identify bias, to make sure—now, as you heard announced yesterday, the AI Navigator that allows us to track these agents and ensure that we understand whether agents are behaving in a way that is copacetic with the intention of the business user. And if one fails or starts to behave in a way that is not aligned with the organization, you’re able to flag that. You’re able to communicate that to other connected agents so that you can source the problem and solve the problem.

I think when we think of it in that way, this is a real opportunity for the channel to step in. These moments of “How do I bridge the technology into value?” is the perfect space for resellers, service providers, solution providers to step in, navigate that complexity for the customer, give the customer confidence with the technology choices that they’re making—that they are safe and secure with SAS.

As I frame it, we’re a 50-year-old vendor who’s been in the most regulated industries. Others out there turn up with an easy button and a black box. We turn up with a transparent box and a governance framework that means we acknowledge nothing’s easy, but once you engage in this, you will survive audit. You will be able to understand where problems occurred and why, and you will be able to remediate.

Robert Dutt: A few years ago, maybe about three, you guys signed on TD SYNNEX. I think that’s the first major global distribution partner for you guys. What was the hypothesis behind that move, and how has it worked out?

John Carey: So the general hypothesis was—and again, I’ve been in the industry a long time. I think every year we hear the headline, “This is the year distribution is no longer relevant.” I actually did a column on that not too long ago.

Robert Dutt: There you go.

John Carey: And meanwhile, they continue to provide new and incremental value. One of the hypotheses was as we moved to indirect, there is obviously—from going from thousands of customers to hundreds of partners, going from hundreds of partners to one distributor allows us to get that leverage effect through quotes, transactions, credit. Something that provides a security to us as a vendor that allows us to lean in, but also provides structure and options at the partner level that they need, but are not a priority for us as a vendor.

So TD SYNNEX offers financing terms. They will invoice on behalf of the partner. They will put together creative fiscal options that allow customers to stretch. They’ll even offer to assess credit based on the end user’s credit rather than the partner’s credit. Those are fantastic services that just, frankly, as a vendor, aren’t our core business. So what we’re able to do is to address more customers through more partners and do the thing that we’re really good at: solve their data and AI problems through Viya and our solution stack and bring value to those businesses.

Robert Dutt: Given all that, a while ago the goal was set for 30%, I think, of revenues through channels. Where does that sit today? What’s the momentum looking like? And what do you see as sort of remaining obstacles along the way to that goal?

John Carey: Yeah, so great progress. So if I think about segments—the channel segment, which is 100% indirect, is between 10% and 15% of our business. In the enterprise, there’s a lot of channel fulfillment and engagement. And so overall, we are very close to that 30% of the total business being with or through a partner. But we want to—the new goal is, as all goals change: I want to be 30% of the overall business with that channel segment. With that segment of customers that are exclusively partner, and therefore be a strong contributor into the enterprise accounts with partner co-sell, partner fulfillment, and partner delivery. So future’s bright. All goals, as they need to, change over time and the bar increases. And we are doing a great job of forcing that bar up every year so that we have to ask more of ourselves and our partners so that we make sure we focus on delivering value to our customers.

Robert Dutt: Let’s talk about what it looks like to be a SAS partner today in terms of the economics and all that kind of good stuff. What does success look like economically for a partner today? And how is that story changing as the product portfolio and the goal shifts?

John Carey: As you say, goals are made for changing. And especially in this industry, things change fast. So maybe a good way of thinking about this is: what’s the conversation with a new partner that we’re onboarding? And one of the things we’ve tried to do is to say, “Hey, look, we will have the packaging so that you can focus on sales readiness first and build a book of business with us.” So that’s where we leverage package service offerings from our SAS consulting organization that are resellable by partners.

We are rationalizing our product portfolio for the SMB market to be far more prescriptive. We know what works, but we still have the full enterprise list of offers, and frankly, it doesn’t add value. It adds something of a confusing layer of options that aren’t really relevant for many of the use cases and customers that we and our partners specifically deal with.

So phase one: build an annuity business on the resale model. As you become—and as it makes sense in your business—to invest in services headcount, then those package service offerings get replaced by your own services. And it is a services-rich business. The great thing about a data and AI platform is once you start answering questions and you’ve built that trust with the client, more and more questions occur. And models need to be refined; models need to be promoted. And as a partner, if you are doing this in a regular cadence, you are building a scenario where that customer trusts you as their trusted advisor and comes to you for those service elements.

So the baseline is—and we pay more on New than we do on Renew. There’s an annuity business build out there that is driven by sales enablement and sales focus and strong investment in demand generation on our channel marketing center platform, where you can run co-branded campaigns and drive real top-of-the-funnel demand. We’ll work with you on getting that down into closed business, and we know how to do that very well.

As it becomes reasonable for you to make investments in technical resources where you know you have a book of business, you can apply those resources too. That’s where we ask partners to lean in. And at that point, they are now attaching services, and that grows their—and we know that services are more profitable than the resale. So it’s table stakes: build a book of business that’s got an annuity associated, and then use that to catalyze investment in more profitable services over time, which is something of a sea change. When I came in, there was a lot of investment required before a partner was allowed to sell. And we’ve inverted that to say, “I want it to be easy for you to sell and we’ll support you.” And when you’ve got the right amount of business behind you, then it makes logical sense for you to invest. And that investment is the outsized return for you as a partner.

Now, for our existing partners, it’s the inverse, right? They were already doing a lot of delivery. They know how to do the services. This now gives them a vehicle to attach those services to that’s more autonomous and less dependent on a SAS seller to pull them in after. And so with that, they’ve made great investments in sales functions within their organizations for product sale and attaching their own services straight out of the gate.

Robert Dutt: Big announcement week this week with AI Navigator on governance, the new agentic AI capabilities across the board, the industry accelerators. From a channel strategy standpoint, do these announcements change who you’re looking for in terms of partners, or is it an opportunity to do more and different things with the base?

John Carey: I think the honest answer is both. If I think about our GSIs, the accelerators, the models, the agentic capabilities are incredibly attractive to our global systems integrator partners. And it gives them a reason to lean in even more with us around account telemetry, account planning, and moving out of that advisory engagement into delivery engagement with them. And we are now a very modern platform that has been very considerate of where our customers are.

We’re a company who reflects the personality of our founder. I think of that Teddy Roosevelt quote: “Walk quietly, but carry a big stick.” Well, we walk quietly, but with our platform and our solutions, that’s a very big stick. It makes a lot of noise. And I think what you saw at this Innovate was kind of something we’ve known for a while, but now the market is starting to recognize is that there’s a lot of significant growth value there for existing customers as they move to Viya and the Viya solutions with the agentic AI integrations, with the accelerators.

So that’s happening, I think, on the other side. We are now at a point of inflection where enterprise capabilities are expected at non-enterprise accounts. And how we execute on that is through partners and through prescription and optimization, so that when we engage, we give those customers a very clear message of what they can do and what they can achieve and what it’s going to cost them. And that is all within their budgetary expectation, and we execute on that relentlessly and consistently with our partners.

Robert Dutt: When I chatted with Ryan Macdonald, who heads up the Canadian operations, a bit earlier, he talked about—especially in competitive situations—what he called a “hidden SAS situation,” where organizations will find that they’re running business-critical decisions on stuff, on SAS, that they’ve almost forgotten about. It just kind of sits there, it just works. And the conversation becomes about: how do you upgrade and grow from that foundation? How do you find that conversation showing up in the partner community? And if it is, in fact, a partner conversation, how are you equipping partners to realize that opportunity?

John Carey: Yeah, so I think that’s very much a conversation with our established enterprise industry accounts. And so how I think that shows up is our conversations with our global systems integrator partners. They’ve made investments in assessment tools and accelerators and migration pathways that help a customer understand how they are currently using their SAS estate and what critical functions are being run on that estate, so they can help a customer understand the actual relevance.

It’s like, I live in Florida, right? I only notice the air conditioning when it doesn’t work. But you don’t switch off the air conditioning unless you’ve got an alternative ready to go. And their job is to make sure customers, when making strategic decisions, understand the impact of decisions they may make. And that, I think, creates an opportunity for how we’re talking about: “We’re going to actually upgrade you so that you have better climate control, right? You have new options. It can be more cost-effective as it scales and it can meet more of your needs. And you don’t lose the critical foundation that you’ve been building your business on.”

I think there’s some of that recognition that we’re a relatively humble organization, but I’m starting to hear more of our customers acknowledge, more of our partners talk about, “Hey, let’s not shy away from the fact you’re running your business on SAS.” This is critical functionality. We hear billions being managed. When we think about our price book, we talk about billions of assets under management. I mean, that’s the order of magnitude of what we’re managing from a risk or a fraud perspective. And we want to make sure that we can meet customers where they are and make sure they make decisions that are good and solid for their business.

Robert Dutt: Another one that came up with Ryan was the idea of increasingly seeing GSI plus niche specialist partner and kind of the ecosystem play. I’m curious if that’s a deliberate strategy. Is it something you’ve observing and adopting to?

John Carey: For me, I think it’s always been there. I think GSIs have always really effectively subcontracted in specific expertise and niche value as needed when doing delivery. I think what’s happening now, again, with disruptive inflection points—what I believe we see happening is things that were already happening become very visible. So I think what we’re seeing right now is, rather than that being a subcontract relationship, it’s a more explicit contract with GSI, contract with boutique partner with very specialized expertise. And it’ll settle over time, and it may even go back to more of a subcontract model. But I think that’s great. We’re all acknowledging that there is value in industry expertise, and even within industry expertise, there is real value in some very niche expertise that requires that level of investment. And you should be paying to make sure you get the right value resource working on your project.

Robert Dutt: If I’m a Canadian reseller or a system integrator who hasn’t worked with SAS to date listening to this and thinking, “All right, they have an interesting story, they’re in an interesting place.” What’s the right profile for a partner for you right now? What are you looking for? What do you actually need more of in the market?

John Carey: I would say I’m looking for solution providers. So I’m looking for partners who can address mid-market organizations’ needs across data and AI. With a strong relationship with TD SYNNEX, great credit, skills in infrastructure, security, data, who are looking to an adjacent expansion where bringing in SAS as a way to modernize that data for the AI lifecycle and turn that data now into insight and from insight into workflow integrated with agentic capabilities. If that’s your bag, don’t just knock on the door, knock our door down. We want to talk to you.

Robert Dutt: Fair enough. Final question: what does the SAS channel look like in three years if things go well and there aren’t additional changes along the way? What would you point to and say, “That’s the thing we’re building towards”?

John Carey: I think the service provider in the mid-market and below will become a far more dominant motion. I think in the enterprise, we’ll see even more integration of partners from a fulfillment perspective as customers start to push vendors to engage with them through the advisors who have guided them through this transformative period.

And I think as a vendor, you just have to acknowledge that the customer is going to tell you who they want to buy from. The customer is going to tell you who they want to work with. And as a vendor, what you want to say is, “Well, if they have the skills, we should lean in. If they don’t have the skills, we should be really honest about the fact that we think you could be better served by a partner that looks with this profile and skills, and here are some we would recommend.” But again, the customer is ultimately going to make the trade-offs.

But I would say managed service providers are increasing, and partners building their own value on top of the Viya platform in industries where we have yet to unlock use cases are becoming more and more the norm.

Robert Dutt: Especially since so much of the audience is in that MSP space, I think that’s going to be one that hits home. Well, John, I appreciate you taking the time on what I’m sure has been a very busy week.

John Carey: I appreciate it, Robert. Thank you for the time.

Robert Dutt: There you have it—John Carey from SAS Institute. I’d like to thank John for his time and thank you for listening.

Few things I’m taking away from this one. First, the framing I kept coming back to is the transparent box versus the black box. Others turn up with the easy button and a black box. SAS turns up and says nothing is easy, but when you engage with us, you’ll understand where problems occurred and why, and you’ll be able to remediate. In an environment where AI governance is moving from a theoretical concern to an operational requirement, that’s a differentiated position and for channel partners, it means the conversation is not just about selling software. It’s about being the guide that helps the customer make confident technology choices.

Second, the direct-to-indirect migration is live right now. The contract between the end user and SAS doesn’t change. What changes is the transaction route, and the pitch to customers is that instead of being part of a long tail at a large enterprise, you become the most important customer of a partner who’s dedicated to your success. It’s a strong repositioning and the kind of opening that partners who have not been in the SAS conversation before should be paying attention to.

Third, John was pretty clear about where the next three years go. Managed service providers building up their own value on top of the Viya platform in industries where use cases are still being unlocked. If you’re an MSP with deep vertical expertise and data, security, or infrastructure skills, this episode makes the case for why you should be knocking on SAS’s door.

We’ll be back on Monday with more from SAS Innovate as we hear the practitioner side of the story: my conversation with Nat D’Ercole from Deloitte Canada on what AI transformation actually looks like from inside a major Canadian enterprise engagement.

If you found this one useful, follow or subscribe to the ChannelBuzz.ca podcast. We’re on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, and most of the major directories. Ratings and reviews are greatly appreciated, especially when they have five stars.

Until next time, I’m Robert Dutt for ChannelBuzz.ca, and I’ll see you in the channel.

Welcome to The Buzz from ChannelBuzz.ca, I’m Robert Dutt, today is Friday, May 1, 2026, and here’s what’s happening in the channel today.

Integris, a managed AI and IT services firm backed by OMERS Private Equity, has announced its intent to acquire First Focus, the largest managed service provider serving small and midsize businesses across Australia, New Zealand, and the Philippines. The deal is subject to regulatory approval and is designed to extend Integris’ geographic footprint while accelerating delivery of secure, scalable AI capabilities across regions. For the channel, it’s a clear example of the platform MSP consolidation trend playing out globally – and for Canadian observers specifically, it’s worth noting that OMERS, the Ontario Municipal Employees Retirement System, is the private equity backer driving this international build-out.

Cybersecurity vendor NeuShield has announced a partnership with Canadian MSP Data Guards to deliver instant ransomware recovery services to clients. In a real-world use case that highlights the collaboration, the companies reported successfully restoring more than 6.2 terabytes of encrypted data in just fifteen minutes. According to NeuShield, this compares to more than five days that would have been required using traditional backup methods. By integrating NeuShield Data Sentinel into its managed security stack, Data Guards can offer one-click recovery of corrupted data and protection at the storage layer against ransomware and file tampering. The partnership underscores a broader trend in the market, as solution providers increasingly move beyond prevention and detection to ensure client data remains continuously recoverable without the need to rebuild systems from scratch.

ThreatLabs Europe, the research arm of ThreatDown, has discovered that threat actors are now weaponizing AI agent skills to deliver the GachiLoader infostealer. According to the company, attackers are using a fake OpenClaw AI agent skill as a lure to inject the Rhadamanthys infostealer directly into memory. The attack utilizes the Polygon blockchain for command and control instructions, allowing it to bypass many traditional perimeter defenses to harvest cryptocurrency wallets, browser credentials, Telegram messages, and password managers. As malicious actors increasingly exploit the expanding footprint of non-human identities, the discovery serves as a clear warning to the channel. IT professionals must ensure comprehensive identity and access management practices account for the vulnerabilities introduced by AI agents operating within client environments.

In Brief – 

Sublime Security plans to go 100 percent channel

Konica Minolta has announced the spring 2026 launch of its AccurioPress C5080 Series for digital production environments. 

Forescout goes on Mission:Possible partner tour

And finally, today’s the day for the launch of Microsoft 365 E7 

Full details and links in the show notes or the blog post.

Later today on In The Channel, we continue our coverage from SAS Innovate 2026, as we talk to SAS global channel chief John Carey about four years building out the channel program for the analytics company, the increasing role of MSPs, and how his own goals for the partner portion of the company’s revenues are evolving.

And if you haven’t heard it yet, yesterday’s episode featured my chat with SAS Canada leader Ryan MacDonald on the state of the AI opportunity in Canada, the role of partners, and why the value of SAS may be hidden to some customers.

That’s how we’re seeing the headlines today. I’m Robert Dutt for ChannelBuzz.ca, thanks for listening. Have a great day.

Welcome to The Buzz from ChannelBuzz.ca, I’m Robert Dutt, today is Thursday, April 30th, and here’s what’s happening in the channel today.

A special edition today. I’ve spent the last couple of days at SAS Innovate 2026 in Washington, and there’s enough here to warrant its own episode before we get to the rest of the week’s news. Product announcements, some candid conversations with SAS leadership, and an honest read on where the enterprise AI market actually stands right now.

Let’s get into it.

The headline from the show floor is that SAS is opening up the Viya platform in a way it hasn’t before. They’ve launched a Viya MCP server – Model Context Protocol – which means SAS capabilities, whether that’s a fraud detection model, a forecasting engine, or a statistical analysis tool, can now be called directly by external AI agents. If your client is running Claude or Microsoft Teams as their AI interface, they can now reach into a SAS Viya model and invoke it as a tool, without being inside Viya at all. Microsoft and Anthropic integrations are live now, with more LLM support coming later this year.

Alongside that, SAS Studio is being rebranded as SAS Workbench, arriving later this year, and SAS is also expanding native support for open table formats – which they’re framing as finally making cloud migration financially viable rather than painful.

And for partners and developers interested in building on top of all this: an Agent AI with SAS Viya certification is available now, and a free open-source Agent AI Accelerator framework is up on GitHub.

SAS has been making governance noise for a few years. This week, the company introduced AI Navigator, a SaaS solution designed to help organizations compile a complete AI inventory and govern AI use cases, including the models and agents that power them. Agent sprawl is real, and this is a direct response to it. Navigator is coming to Azure Marketplace in both public and private configurations – meaning you don’t need to be a Viya customer to have a governance conversation.

I sat down with Reggie Townsend, SAS’s vice president of AI ethics, governance and social impact. His framing is worth repeating: governance is no longer a compliance checkbox – it’s a competitive differentiator. In his words, the AI debate is no longer innovation versus trust. He also told us that the Navigator product grew directly out of an internal SAS problem – they discovered five different business units were using five different AI models to respond to RFPs. They consolidated to one champion model, one challenger. That specific use case became a product feature.

The most useful conversation of the week was with Gavin Day, SAS’s chief operating officer, who oversees all revenue-generating functions including channel. He gave the most honest market read I heard at the show.

On AI ROI: productivity gains are real. SAS internally cut their development lifecycle by roughly 60% using AI techniques. But for high-stakes, mission-critical use cases, the precision problem remains unsolved. His line: if you ask an LLM the same question ten times, you don’t get the same answer ten times – and if you’re working on anti-money laundering, that’s never going to be okay. That’s the gap.

He also confirmed what a lot of people in this industry are probably already sensing: behind closed doors, CIOs are telling him that IT budgets are being quietly redirected to AI experimentation. Nobody says it out loud. But the investment is real, and the ROI conversation is still very much open.

Day confirmed that as of last summer, SAS automated their inbound partner lead routing – leads that fit a partner profile now go directly to that partner without SAS in the middle. Small operational detail, real signal about where their head is at on the partner motion.

He also flagged something worth watching on pricing: his prediction is the industry is moving toward outcome-based models, where customers start paying when the technology is implemented and actually delivering value – not on a multi-year implementation runway. That’s a shift worth tracking.

In addition to this episode of the Buzz, tune in later today for an In The Channel episode where I sit down with Ryan MacDonald, country manager for SAS Canada to find out about top opportunities for the company’s partners back home, and tomorrow I’ll bring you an interview with John Carey, who has signficantly ramped up the company’s partnering efforts over the last four years.

Of course, there’s plenty going on beyond SAS Innovate this week. Here are a few headlines that caught our eye – and for more detail on any of them, check the show notes or blog post for this episode.

“Microsoft beat Q3 expectations last night – Azure up 40%, Copilot crosses 20 million paid commercial seats – and M365 E7 launches tomorrow.”

“Lenovo has acquired Phoenix Technologies’ firmware business, bringing in-house the firmware running on over a billion devices worldwide.”

“Auvik has launched Aurora AI agents, embedded directly into its platform for proactive MSP network management.”

“And Aviatrix is out with AgentGuard – an agentic AI security platform built around containment, delivered entirely through the channel.”

That’s how we’re seeing the headlines today. I’m Robert Dutt for ChannelBuzz.ca, thanks for listening. Have a great day.

Robert Dutt: Hello and welcome to In The Channel from ChannelBuzz.ca, bringing news and information to the Canadian IT channel community for the last sixteen years. I’m Robert Dutt, editor of ChannelBuzz.ca and your host for the show.

SonicWall has published annual threat research for years, but this year they did something different. They stopped calling it a threat report. The 2026 Cyber Protect Report reframes the conversation away from data for its own sake towards something MSPs can actually use – a set of tools and talking points for strategic conversations with customers. The hook they chose? The seven deadly sins of SMB cybersecurity. Seven predictable, preventable failures that show up in breach after breach.

My guest is Michael Crean, senior vice president and general manager of managed security services at SonicWall. Michael came to SonicWall through the acquisition of Solutions Granted, the MSSP he built and one of the early pioneers of SOC-as-a-service for the MSP market. Before that, nine years in the military. So when he talks about what MSPs are getting wrong on security, he’s speaking from a fairly unusual vantage point – inside the SOC, inside the vendor, inside the partner community itself.

The report had been out about a month when we sat down and I was curious what the actual conversation had looked like since launch. We got into that, the sins themselves, the 181-day dwell time that should make many MSPs uncomfortable, and what it really means to be or partner with a true MSSP.

Let’s get right into it. My chat with Michael Crean.

Michael, thanks for taking the time. I appreciate it.

Michael Crean: Absolutely, sir.

Robert Dutt: You called this report the Cyber Protect Report, not the threat report that you guys have been publishing for years. That seems like a deliberate choice. What are you trying to signal with that shift and who are you really talking to with this report?

Michael Crean: I think every other threat report just looks the same. It’s got some different colors, it’s got some different logos, but everybody talks about the same exact thing and it felt boring. It felt like, “Why do we have to fit into the same role as everyone else? Why can’t we do something different that’s purposeful and should be meaningful to people?” It actually gives them something to talk about – not just with themselves internally, but also to their customers. That was the reason we went down this path and decided to call it the Protect Report.

Robert Dutt: I’m guessing that also sets up why you went with the framing of those seven deadly sins – the seven predictable, preventable failures. I thought that was a really neat hook for it. When you look at that list, which one do you think most MSPs would be surprised to see themselves in? Not so much their customers, but themselves as MSPs?

Michael Crean: Number one – ignoring the fundamentals. I mean, it’s incredible the amount of times – because of the work that we do at the SonicWall Security Operations Centers and the amount of compromises that we’re brought in to participate in, investigate, help people with – that you just find it’s this overwhelming amount of: you had the right tools, you had the right tech, and you didn’t know what to do with it. Or you did and you just didn’t take the time to really learn how to ride the bike well. We had a compromise today where a customer of ours got hit with Akira [verify], a ransomware, and we thought we probably knew that the penetration point was the firewall, but we had to do some more investigation. And when we did the investigation, the amount of misconfiguration was staggering [verify]. You pay for all these security services, and they weren’t even enabled – IPS, IDS disabled – and they paid for them. So it’s just unfortunate. These are just, again, what we call ignoring the fundamentals.

Robert Dutt: Do you have any thoughts on what’s driving that? Is it a matter of, this is up and running, moving on to the next shiny thing, moving on to the next opportunity? What’s behind that?

Michael Crean: I think some of it is that MSPs have found themselves in this place of challenge where they have so much responsibility and customers are looking at them. And I heard this a long time ago when I was a child – the smart person is the person that says what they don’t know. I think a lot of people are fearful to show that side of, “I don’t know something.” But saying “I don’t know” doesn’t mean you don’t know and you’ll never know. It just means, “Hey, I don’t know that, but I’m going to go here and ask this person, or I’m going to go to this vendor and get more information, or I’m going to do some more research and come back to you with a really solid answer.” Instead, there’s this constant – I hate to use the word – but it feels like there’s this constant necessity of yes that we have to keep giving our customers. I prefer somebody to tell me, “Nope, I don’t know how to do that, but I’m going to give you a great contact so that you can get it done right.”

So I think that’s part of it. And then we, as manufacturers, we keep telling people all along the way, “Hey, buy my stuff, it fixes your problems. Just buy my stuff.” Well, I can go buy the same box of tools that my mechanic has, but that doesn’t mean I’m a mechanic and it obviously does not mean that my car is going to get fixed just because I’ve got the tools.

Robert Dutt: Can attest to that. Fortunately, not with great experience, but there’s a reason I do take my car to someone else to get looked at.

Michael Crean: Oh my goodness, you and me both. I want it done right. And as hard as I tend to drive my cars – because I have a thing for speed and adrenaline – I would actually like them to be as proper as they can be.

Robert Dutt: Well, especially given that it’s important, when you’re testing the limits shall we say, that the thing stays together while you’re doing so.

Michael Crean: Absolutely.

Robert Dutt: And back to that point, I think there’s also the factor of when you are presenting yourself – and most MSPs do – as the trusted advisor, the expert on this, who’s going to take care of all this, that creates an even greater disincentive to admitting, “You know what? I need to check on that. Let me find out more,” rather than saying, “Yeah, I got this.”

Michael Crean: I think it’s human nature, just in general. Because the moment you admit you don’t know something or you’re not certain, at that very moment in time, we just assume that to be a point of weakness. I believe through the military – I served for nine years – and being a CEO and founder for 22 years, what I really realized, and even when it came to my kids, sometimes when you just don’t know, it’s okay to say you don’t know, but I’m going to find out, or I’m going to figure it out, or we’re going to do it together and we’re both going to be better for it than we were when we started with the question.

Robert Dutt: Funny, that came up early in my journalism career too. My editor at the time would say, “Your job is not to know. Your job is to find the person who does.” Along the same lines, a little bit of a different lens. You said something that I quoted in the news piece we did on the release of the report: that the danger isn’t that AI isn’t working – it’s that we’re using it as an excuse not to do the things we already know we should. That’s a remarkably direct thing for a security vendor to say, and it touches on that eating-your-vegetables kind of advice. What are you seeing that made you include that line?

Michael Crean: It’s not what I’m seeing today. It’s what I’ve seen for the last 20 years in this industry. I mean, we went from deep packet inspection firewalls to next-generation firewalls. We got all of these extra added capabilities in the firewall, but then we got lazy on doing proper firewalling – controlling ports both inbound and outbound the way we used to do it – because we felt that we were overcompensating because we had so much power and capabilities. Then we went from signature-based AV to next-gen AV where we had these mathematical algorithms doing predictive analysis to understand whether a file is good or bad. Then we got EDR technologies helping us with the behaviour behind it. We just keep adding and adding and adding.

I see AI as nothing more than just another tool. But how good can a tool be when you’re not performing the fundamentals? It helps, but it just can’t – I don’t know if you’re a sports guy or not, but think about it. When you look at the best of the best, whoever that may be – I’m a hockey guy – I’ll call Alex Ovechkin today. The best of the best, the all-time goal scorer. He beat Wayne Gretzky, he took that last year. That man works hard and he works on the fundamentals. I love what AI can do for us – to help get rid of some of the tasks that we don’t want to do, that we hate to do, that we can use for automation and make things faster, help us find bugs in our code, and in a security operations center, get through just mounds of data quicker. But you still have to do the fundamentals and you have to do the right things. Because when you do the right things and then you add something like AI to it, the world becomes a much different place.

Robert Dutt: 88% of the SMB breaches you’re reporting on involved ransomware. That’s more than double the enterprise rate, if I’m remembering correctly. That’s a striking gap. What’s causing that? Do you see it as primarily resources, primarily end-user training, or something structural about how SMBs get attacked that’s different from enterprise?

Michael Crean: I think it’s a little bit of everything that you mentioned, but mostly what it is, is this perception of, “I’m too little. I don’t have anything valuable. Why would somebody want to attack me?” When these large threat actors are going after huge enterprises – Colonial Pipeline, JBS, some massive organization – those organizations have better tools, better resources, better people, and they probably have more maturity to respond when they start to notice an attack taking place.

When you think nobody’s ever going to break into your house, you may not lock your doors. You may not care about having the 70-pound German shepherd on watch when you’re not there. Because, I don’t have anything in my house of perceived value. But when you take that shotgun approach and you can knock down a hundred SMBs and get $10,000 out of each one, that’s a hell of a payday. It’s logical what we’re seeing right now. What it requires is that we all understand we have responsibility for the data that’s been entrusted to us – whether it’s customer data or supply chain data you’re responsible for because you’re supporting another vendor. The data we have is far more valuable than we give it credit for.

Robert Dutt: And I guess there might also be an element of the ability to fly under the radar – the opposite of security through obscurity – in that you make that hit on Colonial Pipeline and it’s front-page news everywhere. You hit a bunch of small businesses for ten grand each, it gets a lot less attention from media.

Michael Crean: I mean – I’m sure you’ve heard this, you’ve been doing this long enough – the idea around news and media: if it bleeds, it leads. And it’s not really sexy when you talk about a two-chair dental practice that gets hit with ransomware. And the two-chair dental practice doesn’t really want to talk about it either, because they’re a small community-based organization and it’s really damaging to how people potentially look at them. Whereas a Target, a Home Depot, a Lowe’s, whoever gets hit with ransomware – they’ve got the marketing machine, the attorneys, the dollars, the insurance. And at the end of the day, they’ll be as profitable, if not more profitable, a few quarters later.

Robert Dutt: The report surfaces the number of 181 days of dwell time. For an MSP who’s running monthly security reports, quarterly reviews, thinks they have things in order – that number has to sting. What does it require of an MSP’s operating model to address that?

Michael Crean: One, making sure that the investments you’ve made and the technologies you’ve decided to procure – the tools you’re going to use – make sure you’re well-trained on them and well-versed on the best practices so that you can get optimal outcomes. Patch management, man – I can’t tell you the amount of times we’ve seen… you talk about this 181 days, it comes down so many times to pure patch management. And the vast majority of manufacturers give you the patches for free. But we don’t think about it, we get distracted, we don’t see it as valuable as it really is. And it’s the really simple things. Again, it’s that number one – ignoring the fundamentals. Patching has been a fundamental thing we’ve talked about for so long.

And I also think that for an MSP that just magically adds the additional S and starts calling themselves an MSSP – don’t dabble in security. Either do or do not. Do not try. We’re going to throw a little Yoda in here for the day. And if you’re not going to be a real MSSP, partner with one. There are so many great organizations out there – I’ll say we’re a great organization to partner with, that’s how we go to market – but there are lots of others out there who are purpose-built for this. It’s like being the best doctor in the world but you’re not a surgeon. So you refer somebody to a surgeon to get that surgery done.

Robert Dutt: Your own background includes Solutions Granted – building out one of the first SOC-as-a-service models for MSPs before SonicWall acquired you. I’m curious, when you look back at your time on the other side, when you were the MSP – are there any of those sins you look at and go, “Hmm, that sounds awfully familiar”?

Michael Crean: Oh, absolutely. I will say I went through that transition – 22 years of being a VAR, to being a government contractor, to being an MSP – realizing I was a really crappy MSP. Not going to lie. My bedside manner wasn’t great. I wasn’t passionate about what I was doing. And I think that’s something that gets lost sometimes. I was super passionate about security – getting out of the military, transitioning away from that, getting into IT and the tech space. And when I found my way into this SOC-as-a-service MSP space, it’s where I found my passion and love again. And I think that means a lot. Don’t do it for the sake of doing it. I think we all have to keep the lights on and put food on the table and clothe our kids and find a way to retirement one day, but find some happiness in that too and be really passionate about what you’re doing. And you’ll probably find a lot of these seven deadly sins aren’t as deadly for you.

Robert Dutt: That’s one way of mitigating it, that’s for sure. The report is framed around protection outcomes and it’s explicitly aimed at giving MSPs the language to have strategic conversations with SMB decision-makers. But there’s a responsibility question underneath that. If the MSP is the last line of defense for most SMBs – and I think we’ve talked about this a little bit already – what does good actually look like? What’s the bar you have to reach before you either back off from security and/or partner with someone else who’s much more committed?

Michael Crean: I think, one, it’s a team effort. It isn’t just the MSP’s responsibility. The business owners, the decision-makers, the board, whoever you’re dealing with that’s making these decisions – they have to buy in. And if they don’t, well, then you’re at a disconnect. You’re bringing in a subject matter expert – the MSP – to help make them more secure, for survivability, for all the things they’re asking for to make sure they can operate at the highest levels possible, and then you don’t allow them to do their job. That’s a huge risk.

What I will say – and this is a hard lesson to learn, but one of the most valuable lessons to learn – is when you fire your first customer. Not get fired, but you actually fire your first customer because it wasn’t the right fit and the financial impact was going to hurt. It didn’t feel good. Nobody ever really wants to get fired or be fired. But when you do that, you start to mature. And inevitably, you also help that customer mature – because if they hear the same message from multiple people: “We’ve got to do patch management. Don’t tell me we can’t. We’re going to use MFA. We’re going to have a SOC monitoring this 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year. We’re going to take away administrative privileges. We’re going to do the fundamentals. We’re going to make investments in tools and put the right people, process, and technology in place.” The outcomes really start to matter.

But it is a team sport. I can’t tell you – and I’m sure you’ve heard this – MSPs talking about, “I can’t get my customer to use MFA, so I got them to sign this indemnification clause.” How many MSPs are getting sued, and these indemnification clauses aren’t holding up? Because you’re the expert. If you believe it’s 100% the right thing to do, then if they don’t follow – you fire them.

Robert Dutt: It’s funny how often it comes down to that. I’ve heard that same sentiment from MSPs in the move towards, “This is what you have to take. It is not negotiable. It is the cost, as it were, of doing business with us.” I think that’s sage advice.

Michael Crean: We accept it from our surgeons, right? If I’ve got a bum knee and I need it fixed and I’m a little overweight and he knows I’m drinking a little too much bourbon or eating a little too much red meat and he wants me to lose ten pounds so that he can be successful – if I’m not doing my part, well, why does he want to do surgery on me?

Robert Dutt: Point taken. The report’s been out for a few weeks now. Curious – what’s the question you’re getting most from partners that you didn’t expect as they sit with this? What’s hit differently than you thought it might?

Michael Crean: I thought we were going to get more pushback on why we called it a Protect Report instead of a Threat Report. That really isn’t the question we’ve been getting. What’s been surprising to me is the commentary. The unsolicited emails, the LinkedIn requests, the comments – people have really enjoyed receiving a report that just wasn’t like everything else. There’s been a lot of commentary along the lines of, “I’m going to have this discussion and use these analogies and use these seven deadly sins to have conversations with my customers.” That’s what we were hoping for, but you never know when you go against the grain how well it’s going to hit. I think we got lucky.

Robert Dutt: It sounds very much like mission accomplished. I know it’s something that caught my attention and that I’ve heard out there as well. I look forward to seeing what comes next as you continue to reinvent what these kinds of reports do and what they look like. Michael, I thank you for taking the time to talk through this and to offer some advice.

Michael Crean: I appreciate your time as well, sir. Thanks a lot.

Robert Dutt: There you have it – Michael Crean from SonicWall.

I’d like to thank Michael for his time, and for a conversation that felt a little different from the usual vendor security briefing. His background – building Solutions Granted from scratch, running a real MSSP, operating inside a SOC, and now sitting on the vendor side – gives him a perspective that’s harder to find than you’d think among people who are now in vendor roles.

A few things will stay with me. The mechanic analogy – you can own the same box of tools, but that doesn’t make you a mechanic, and it doesn’t mean your car is going to get fixed. The surgeon line – if the patient won’t follow the pre-op advice, why are you doing the surgery? His answer on when an MSP reaches maturity – it’s the moment you fire your first customer who won’t implement MFA or basic patch management, even when it hurts. And the Ovechkin riff – even the greatest goal scorer in NHL history never stopped working on the fundamentals.

Now, after we stopped recording, Michael mentioned something he wished he’d worked into the interview, and I promised I’d pass it along. Of the seven deadly sins in the report, I asked which one is most personally interesting to him and he landed on sin number five – cost-driven security decisions. He illustrated it this way: he’d been speaking at a conference recently and asked how many in the room had bought a car in the last eighteen months. A lot of hands. Then he asked how many of them had bought the cheapest car on the lot. Not one hand went down. Because we think about safety ratings, about the features, about whether the thing will hold together when we need it to. But when it comes to cybersecurity, too many businesses just reach for the cheapest option. As Michael said himself, it’s a little strange to have a personal favourite deadly sin. But there you have it.

The 2026 Cyber Protect Report is well worth a look for any MSP or solution provider thinking about how to have a more strategic security conversation with their customers. Links in the show notes.

If you found this useful, follow or subscribe to In The Channel from ChannelBuzz.ca wherever you get your podcasts – you’ll find us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, and all the major directories. Ratings and reviews are always appreciated and genuinely help other people in the channel find the show.

Until next time, I’m Robert Dutt for ChannelBuzz.ca, and I’ll see you in the channel.

Welcome to The Buzz from ChannelBuzz.ca, I’m Robert Dutt, today is Wednesday, April 29th, and here’s what’s happening in the channel today.

Google Cloud has officially launched its new Google Cloud Partner Network, formalizing a shift in how the provider interacts with its channel ecosystem. According to the company, the rollout is designed to streamline partner engagement and capitalize on solution providers looking to diversify their cloud infrastructure bets away from Microsoft’s dominant ecosystem. The new structure represents a strategic realignment for the hyperscaler, providing clearer pathways for partners building out generative AI and data analytics practices. For Canadian solution providers, the formalized program offers a tangible secondary option in the cloud space. Having a strong alternative ecosystem provides crucial leverage in vendor negotiations and gives MSPs a viable path for clients who are seeking different commercial models for their AI transformations or are wary of vendor lock-in.

Microsoft and OpenAI have altered the terms of their landmark partnership, including significant revisions to their revenue-sharing agreements. The move signals a shift in the underlying dynamics of the tech industry’s most closely watched artificial intelligence alliance. While the specific financial splits remain undisclosed, the restructuring points to a maturation of the relationship as both companies seek to maximize their returns on massive infrastructure investments. This realignment happens just as both vendors are aggressively expanding their respective channel footprints. The economics forged at the top of this partnership will inevitably dictate the pricing, packaging, and margin opportunities available to the broader ecosystem. Canadian MSPs building practices around Microsoft Copilot, or those exploring OpenAI’s recent moves to build a dedicated channel program, need to monitor these developments closely. When tier-one vendors adjust their revenue expectations, those shifts frequently cascade down to partner profitability.

Cybersecurity provider Guardz has released its 2026 MSP Threat Report, highlighting how AI-driven attacks are reshaping the threat landscape. According to the report released yesterday, non-human identities now outnumber human users by a ratio of 25 to one across client environments. This expansion is being actively exploited by threat actors, who are using AI to accelerate attacks targeting identity, email, and cloud infrastructure. The data indicates that traditional perimeter defenses are increasingly being bypassed by attackers leveraging unmonitored service accounts and API keys. This is a shift that lands directly on the service desk. Securing human endpoints and implementing standard multi-factor authentication is no longer sufficient. Solution providers now have to govern the massive web of non-human identities accessing their clients’ data. This represents a significant vulnerability that requires immediate remediation, but it also opens a distinct avenue to expand managed security practices around comprehensive identity and access management.

Later today on In The Channel, we’re talking about the seven deadly sins of SMB cybersecurity. Michael Crean, senior vice president and general manager of managed security services at SonicWall, joins the show to discuss the 2026 Cyber Protect Report and why MSPs need to stop ignoring the fundamentals.

And if you haven’t heard it yet, yesterday’s episode features a conversation on why networking is not sexy until it doesn’t work. Doug Houghton, director of global channels at Alkira, explains why legacy networks weren’t designed for the elasticity demanded by today’s AI workloads.

That’s how we’re seeing the headlines today. I’m Robert Dutt for ChannelBuzz.ca, thanks for listening. Have a great day.

Robert Dutt: Hello and welcome to In The Channel from ChannelBuzz.ca, bringing news and information to the Canadian IT channel community for the last sixteen years. I’m Robert Dutt, editor of ChannelBuzz.ca and your host for the show.

If you were around when SD-WAN was the big disruptive idea in networking – the promise of simplifying branch connectivity, cutting costs, getting smarter about traffic – you probably also remember it didn’t quite deliver everything it promised. Not because the technology was bad, but because the underlying network architecture couldn’t keep up. You still ended up with complexity. It just moved somewhere else.

That problem is essentially the founding insight behind Alkira. The company was built by Amir Khan and Atif Khan, the same team behind Viptela, the startup widely credited with creating the SD-WAN category before Cisco acquired it. What they learned in that experience is that SD-WAN, without a proper global backbone, just creates a different set of headaches. So they started fresh and built what they call NIaaS – Network Infrastructure as a Service – a cloud-native, consumption-based approach that abstracts the complexity of multi-cloud connectivity into something you could stand up, as my guest today puts it, with just a username and a password.

The timing is not accidental, because what AI demands from a network – elasticity, low latency, the ability to reach distributed workloads almost anywhere instantly – is exactly what legacy infrastructure wasn’t built to handle.

My guest is Doug Houghton, Director of Global Channels at Alkira. Doug has been in the channel a long time, knows the technology in a way that might genuinely surprise you coming from a channel chief, and has a lot to say about what it all means as a real business opportunity for Canadian VARs and MSPs.

Let’s get right into it, my chat with Doug Houghton.

Doug, thanks for taking the time. I appreciate it.

Doug Houghton: It’s my pleasure. Thank you for having me on today, Robert.

Robert Dutt: So you were part of the team that built up the SD-WAN market at Viptela back in the day. What did you learn there that told you the next big thing was going to be NIaaS, and why now?

Doug Houghton: First off, that’s a great question. I felt a bit like a passenger in a car racing a thousand miles an hour when we were doing software-defined wide-area networking.

What we learned was that without organizing your cloud infrastructure properly, your cloud bill gets ridiculously large – especially if you keep your control element decoupled from your data plane in the cloud with all these workloads churning. But what we really learned, and what’s applicable to what we’re now doing at Alkira, is that SD-WAN truly did deliver on its core promise. It allows customers to influence traffic based on link quality and improve the user experience. If you’re on a phone call and it starts to get goofy, you can move over to a better-performing link in real time without dropping the call. That’s powerful. And the same with data traffic.

What I hadn’t fully thought through was what happens as global companies start to adopt SD-WAN and disaggregate across locations in Southeast Asia, China, Latin America, and everywhere else. The latency back to the control element isn’t easy to contend with. So you ended up with organizations making decisions that effectively created four separate, disparate networks for latency purposes. And that was not part of the original promise.

What we learned was that you need a global backbone that’s high throughput and low latency. The edge can still be SD-WAN – there are real things in SD-WAN that people still want, whether that’s WAN optimization, deduplication, caching, policy-based routing, forward error correction. All of that still has practical application, and site-to-site communications are still needed in many use cases.

But Alkira was built inside the cloud first, employing the same principle of decoupling control plane from data plane for scale. By abstracting the cloud infrastructure, we were able to remediate the latency that those four geographically dispersed networks created. We’re the global backbone – that middle mile with high throughput and low latency – and then you connect these clusters of SD-WAN networks together and all of a sudden the promise of SD-WAN gets a lot more consumable. You have a singular network managed from a singular control plane and element management orchestrator, and you can still get all the benefits of SD-WAN at the local sites.

Robert Dutt So in plain language, a Canadian MSP or VAR is used to selling network hardware or managing someone else’s infrastructure. How is selling, deploying, and managing NIaaS different from what they’re already doing, and what makes that distinction important?

Doug Houghton: Let’s take a half step back and talk about what NIaaS actually is. It’s Network Infrastructure as a Service. What Alkira does is abstract the cloud infrastructure and build a routed overlay on top of it. We think of it as a virtualized colocation facility that connects and normalizes communications across your entire network. For managed service providers and service providers, our solution accelerates bringing their customers to cloud applications, cloud workloads, storage, and everything else the cloud promises.

The way I explain it to my mom – and I’ve told this joke once already today because I’m sitting in a partner’s office right now – is this: if you went to Russia, Japan, Argentina, and San Francisco all in one day and had to transact in each place, and you could speak the native language in each one, that would be ideal. What we focused on was normalizing communications regardless of the cloud service provider, colocation provider, data centre – private or public – or whatever type of router is at the branch office.

As an MSP or service provider that comes in, what we give to our customers and partners is a username and a password. That lets you come in and – for your old-school folks in the audience – essentially etch-a-sketch your network together. You can turn a couple of knobs, and it’s not that we’ve cranked the amp up to eleven, we’ve just removed all the numbers and automated everything. It just knows what you want to do.

It’s a routed BGP overlay with the control plane abstracted from it, so the forwarding plane can route around things like the CrowdStrike outage, or losing an AWS region – which happens more frequently than AWS would like to admit – or any cloud service provider incident. The multi-cloud reality has accelerated adoption, but it presents a new problem: you’ve got an AWS expert on staff, but you don’t have an Azure, GCP, OCI, or Alibaba Cloud expert. Those are all different languages. When I tell my mom that we normalize the communications between all the assets in the network and make it easy to connect to all of them, she gets that.

For the MSP looking to monetize something new or add another revenue stream, we offer a couple of compelling things. In the middle of our stack, we place a solution inside the cloud – sitting in a VPC, VNet, VCN, or Google VPC – right in the middle of all the cloud, SaaS, and WAN workloads. We’ve pleased a lot of customers by lowering total cost of ownership through the consolidation of network services they already have in their environment, in the form of virtualized network functions.

Take a Palo Alto firewall deployment – say you have fifty Palos out there, all talking to Panorama, with a security engineer managing policy centrally. Instead of having fifty firewalls on the ground, you consolidate them. You go from the ground – five to ten milliseconds to the nearest public cloud PoP – hop onto the Alkira fabric, and terminate that traffic on a virtual port on our exchange point. In the middle of that exchange point, sitting in a VPC or VNet, you place a Palo Alto virtualized network function. You get the IP address of the Panorama server, and if you didn’t tell the security engineer anything had changed, they would not know. The form factor changes, but not how they interact with Panorama, how they build policy, or anything about how they secure the traffic. That remains exactly the same.

We virtualize the instance and place it on a global high-throughput, low-latency backbone inside our exchange point. We deploy exchange points in HA pairs, anywhere from 100 Mbps to 40 Gbps. The customer or service provider consumes one, and we maintain the other on their behalf – because every thirty days we’re fixing bugs and doing maintenance. We swing production workloads to the backup, do the work on the primary, then reverse the order, all while keeping these customers up and running. Because we’re delivering this as a service, it has to always be on.

One of the most important architectural decisions we made from the start was ensuring those two exchange points are always running active-active in a full mesh configuration, buttressed by hundreds of other exchange points globally distributed – all synchronized and aware of each other’s states.

Robert Dutt: You’ve said that legacy networks can’t handle what AI demands, specifically in terms of elasticity. Can you unpack that a little? When an MSP’s customer starts deploying language models or agentic workflows, what is it that actually breaks?

Doug Houghton: Good question, and I’ll give you an honest answer. I’ve started to fall in love with Claude – I think it’s one of the coolest things in the world. I can do all sorts of creative things with it. But Claude isn’t talking only to me. He’s a bit of a flirt – he goes to a lot of different places to get knowledgeable about various things and produce the outcomes I’ve asked for. And those other places are where you run into problems.

I used to say the three biggest AI providers are GCP, AWS, and Azure. That’s still largely true. But the likes of Anthropic and other AI labs are distributing LLM workloads everywhere. Without the right network underneath that, it’s like buying the hottest car and driving it down a pothole-filled road.

What we offer is a high-throughput, low-latency, elastic network. If you need to turn it up in a heartbeat, you can. We helped complete the S&P Global and IHS Markit merger network integration in about a tenth of the time they expected, because we’re natively segmented. Think about those two networks as large datasets that AI agents need to access. You have to secure the traffic, and you need it to be elastic – able to reach anywhere, instantly, to produce the outcome the agent was asked for.

The ability to go anywhere on a road that’s smooth as glass, in the hottest car possible – that’s what we offer. Our network infrastructure solution is an abstraction: a forwarding plane that goes everywhere, and your imagination is really the only limitation. Speed, elasticity, and securing access – even for agentic, self-directed workflows – it’s still a critical element.

And nobody – I said this earlier today, so I’ll say it again – networking is not really sexy until it doesn’t work. If I have to get in and route-peer and manually configure transit gateways, I’m going to punch myself in the face repeatedly. I just don’t want to do it. It slows everything down. I can automate it with Terraform, sure. But I want to consume it now. I want to prompt it now. I want the outcome now.

Robert Dutt: You’ve launched Alkira NIA, your AI co-pilot and network infrastructure assistant, along with an MCP server last year. It’s interesting – you’re essentially putting AI on top of the infrastructure that’s enabling AI. What does NIA actually do for an MSP’s day-to-day operations?

Doug Houghton: Maybe I have a limited imagination, but I still use it like a utility. NIA is great because it allows you to search through all our documentation in a more organized way. We have amazing documentation – there’s a lot of it – and when you’re looking for a specific configuration or something captured in a knowledge base, that tool is really useful.

But continuing the utility theme: how do I do something? If I want to create a micro-segment to distribute to a bunch of business units, or build an isolated Layer 3 routing table and get it to various business units, and then set up billing with specific billing tags for each segment – I know how to do that because I’ve done it many times. But a new user may not. You can use the NIA agent to search the documentation, search previous implementation notes, best practices, all of that.

That’s real value. But you can also ask it something like “why is the sun bright” and it won’t return the answer you expect. I’ve done that too.

Robert Dutt: Let’s talk about the Connect Partner Program and the economics. You’ve got the Partner Profit Stack – tiered margins, quarterly rebates, MDF, SPIFFs, the Connect Pipeline Fund. It’s a full toolkit, and it’s stuff partners have seen before. What’s the real math? What does a Canadian MSP at the Premier tier actually walk away with on a typical deal after they’ve done the work?

Doug Houghton: Usually about nineteen percentage points – maybe a little more. On the pre-sale side, when we get into a POC, our Premier partners can earn a $1,000 SPIFF. We close about 85% of our POCs, so there’s real value in that. Add in the rebates and MDF access, and the total haul is closer to 20% on each deal.

Worth mentioning: we’ve been a 100% channel company since May 2022. My partner David Klubinoff, my technical counterpart – we worked together at Viptela and we started the Alkira channel together. It took a couple of weeks to convince our CEO that going 100% channel was the right call. I think he’s a believer now. We’ve driven significant revenue for the company, and our partners are our thought leaders – out in the market talking about our solution and solving customer problems.

I was in Chicago yesterday doing a technical enablement session with thirty-plus SAs and SEs. We had the classic SD-WAN questions, and a lot of questions about segmentation and M&A. There’s enormous consolidation happening in insurance, healthcare, and other sectors, and the overlapping IP address problem that comes with mergers is something MSPs face all the time. We’ve entirely simplified that. You build a NAT policy right in the solution and the overlapping IP issue is resolved within an hour.

In the case of S&P Global and IHS Markit, they thought their merger network integration was going to take a couple of years. The issue was largely the overlapping IP addresses – IHS couldn’t talk to the HR applications at S&P, and vice versa, plus all the other interdependencies. You need a fast way to solve the overlapping IP problem before you can even get to the real work. That’s been a core design element of our solution from the very start: take care of the small things, and people can move faster and get to market faster.

Our biggest MSP – and this is a publicly referenceable customer – is CEDA, a French-based organization that provides managed network services to 95% of the world’s airlines. For them, it means being able to turn up a new customer faster, connecting on-premises assets to their control elements so they can begin actually managing that network. Speed, and the efficiencies and cost reductions that come from it – that’s what it does for all MSPs. If you’re consolidating fifty firewalls into virtualized functions, you’re making a good commission, getting MDF support, quarterly rebates, and a SPIFF when you engage us collaboratively on a POC. All of that happens at an accelerated rate.

I’ve been screaming from the mountaintop about our solution for about four years. Invariably, you’d walk into a room, say “Hi, I’m Doug Houghton from Alkira,” and they’d say “Who?” That’s starting to happen a lot less, which is a genuinely nice thing. Over the last twelve to twenty-four months, the business has grown exponentially, the diversity of our partner ecosystem has increased, and partner margins have been very healthy. The tiered structure was really about celebrating partners who have invested in us.

Honestly, I’m waiting for the day my boss tells me to stop incentivizing partners – because when that happens, I’ll know we’ve hit the apex. Our partners will be generating so much revenue that someone gets uncomfortable with what we’re paying out. I can’t wait for that day.

Some of the more interesting things in the program came from actually listening. I went around and talked to a bunch of partners about their ideal partner programs and built from there. And one of the realizations – I thought it was significant – was what we were actually doing on the post-sale side. We white-glove every implementation right now, because it’s critically important to us. We haven’t lost a customer, and we intend to keep it that way. But that doesn’t scale forever.

So the question became: why don’t we help our partners productize the post-sale work? We built a product catalog, a pricing calculator, and a new partner portal we’re about to release, with its own AI agent for searching market assets. The product catalog was a light bulb moment. We pay healthy margins on the pre-sale side at every tier of Alkira Connect. But we had never touched the post-sale side at all.

We’re largely automated and NIaaS is as simple as possible to consume – a username and a password. My thirteen-year-old could configure a network, and she’s really smart. But there’s still some implementation work. You still need to build policies in Panorama. There’s still DDI work. There are still services that partners can benefit from – and all partner types, MSPs, VARs, master agents, sub-agents, service providers, now have a post-sale commission opportunity.

Robert Dutt: You mentioned services – you’ve got services attach plays around modernization assessments, segmentation design, migration sprints. Starting from zero, how long does it realistically take a partner to get their first deal with those services attached through the door, and what does the ramp look like?

Doug Houghton: There’s a lot in that question. Let’s take a half step back. We have virtual sales and go-to-market training – three modules – and then five or six technical training modules. We’ve got a lab-in-a-box environment, foundational and advanced technical training, and DDI training. Partners typically start there. Then we run regular in-person and virtual sessions – one partner has regular office hours with me, my SE counterpart David, or our architect Christopher Arenas, and we just invite partners to come and ask questions. Getting partners genuinely comfortable with the technology is the most important thing we do, because nobody goes out and sells anything unless they’re confident they can explain how Alkira solves their customer’s problem. That’s what I’m doing in Chicago today.

Our customers tend to be fairly large. We’ve got our first Fortune 10 customer now. The more complex the network, the larger and more global the deployment – multiple countries, security vendors, firewalls, DDI providers, load balancers, service providers, colos. We sit right on top of all of that.

The average sales cycle is about 190 days – a little over six months. A newly enabled partner might encounter an M&A overlapping IP use case, recognize the problem, and say “I think we can solve this with Alkira.” They go through a POC together with us, the customer commits, and that first deal closes around 190 days. A little class week: it’s actually 190 and a half.

The average deal size is about $500,000 USD. We then see significant expansion: typically 4x growth in the first twelve months after the initial close, and around 8x in the second twelve months. Real incentive to stick with it. We’re loyal – if the customer doesn’t kick the partner out, we go to bat with that partner on every expansion deal. We land, then expand, with the same partner. BNSF, one of our other public references, has expanded several times to address more and more use cases. The solution gets sticky and customers are genuinely surprised by how easy it is.

On the post-sale side, we come in and help with implementation, especially early on. But we’re reaching the point where more capable partners can handle it themselves. We’re building a post-sale certification for Alkira right now. In the meantime, we ride shotgun through the first couple of implementations – virtually in Slack or in person – until partners are fully up to speed.

All partners have access to our Slack channel, along with our entire solutions architecture and SE staff. One partner working on a Fortune 10 engagement has a great habit of putting a subject header in Slack and starting a conversation. He’s been on services at this customer for three or four months – a significant engagement. He’s the one who originally described the network as a “spaghetti mess,” which I still chuckle about. I actually built the product catalog based on those Slack headers – pulled them together, socialized them with a group of partners, got input, and built from there.

To directly answer your question: you’ve got to get through that first deal, and we’re going to ride shotgun with you through the first couple of implementations. The partner learns, gets comfortable, can monetize it, and can deliver independently from there. We have no illusions about going back to being a direct company after May 2022. It’s ride or die – 100% channel, and we enable our partners to solve their customers’ problems and support them while they do it. Because our partners have been our biggest growth engine.

Robert Dutt: You’ve talked about a goal of doubling revenue through partners. What does the ecosystem look like when you get there? This sounds like it could primarily be a GSI or large integrator play, given the customer complexity you’re describing. Or do you genuinely see a path for mid-market MSPs and VARs to build a meaningful NIaaS practice?

Doug Houghton: Another tough question. Yes, I do have GSIs as partners. We have a fairly robust and diverse partner ecosystem, and we see small shops rising up while larger shops are moving a bit more slowly, honestly. We’re still in that brand awareness honeymoon period – people are realizing our technology is compelling, getting themselves enabled. Some large partners we’ve recently brought on are still ramping. The biggest and most established organizations aren’t yet as capable as they will be, but we’re working diligently on that.

Some of our smaller partners, on the other hand – I’m thinking of a friend of mine in Utah who is just an absolute champion. He knows our solution better than almost anyone. He closed six or seven deals in the past year, supported the implementations, did it largely on his own, because he’s curious, motivated, read all the documentation, and has been through full implementation cycles with us. He works at a ten-person shop. They just happen to have really good customers, and he knows the solution cold.

So we’re at different stages with different partners in terms of maturity. The answer to your question is genuinely both. The small shop in Utah and the large national partner dedicating more resources as they see more customer problems Alkira can solve – we see wins across both. In the networking space, a six-month sales cycle is about as fast as it gets. I’m giving you a username and a password and you’re going in and connecting all of a customer’s assets together. The path exists for partners of every size.

Robert Dutt: You’ve called out Canada specifically in your expansion plans, alongside the UK, EU, and the Middle East. What does that look like operationally – localized support, a Canadian channel team – or is it more of a global platform available to Canadian partners?

Doug Houghton: Let’s talk personnel. We have a dedicated rep in eastern Canada, based out of New Hampshire, and a brilliant solutions architect just outside of Toronto. We’ve got a channel account manager – very capable teammate of mine, Savannah Stone – and the entire global solutions architecture staff accessible via Slack.

We recently closed a very significant logo in Canada – a large insurance company – and our publicly referenceable Canadian customer is ContactPoint 360, a contact centre and BPO provider. They wanted to connect their Latin American operations back to Canada and couldn’t find an effective way to do it without us. We route them through the US West region, and the results have been excellent. We’ve also added CDW Canada as a partner, and I’ve got a value-added distributor that helps with field events.

It’s not a massive footprint yet – it’s a bit of “they come first, then we build” – but there is a tremendous amount of opportunity in Canada and in Latin America that I’m genuinely excited about. Nobody’s told me no yet on spending budget, so here we go.

A great story on the Canadian side: a gentleman named Chris Thelosinos, an architect and consultant who works with others in our space, is a member at a wine shop in Toronto. During the Toronto International Film Festival last year, we hosted a wine event right next to TIFF. I don’t drink alcohol, so it was entirely about the conversations for me – and I had the best time. We had significant customers come out, and the demand for simplicity, ease of implementation, and everything Alkira does well was just as strong in Canada as anywhere else. The market need is real.

We talk about global backbone as a service all the time. Connecting China to San Francisco carries a distance and time tax, but it’s easy to configure. For organizations navigating geopolitical complexity around China access, or needing GPU connectivity in and out, we just abstract the Azure and AWS mainland China instances. They operate the same way as their Canadian or US equivalents. And you can consume it pay-as-you-go – stop using it, stop paying for it. That’s a compelling model for MSPs looking to grow into different regions.

Robert Dutt: Last question then. For that Canadian MSP who’s listened to this and is thinking, “This sounds like a real opportunity” – what’s the one thing you’d want them to take away and act on?

Doug Houghton: I’d ask them to go to partners@alkira.com and send us a note. And I will ply them with all sorts of content – videos, learnings, deal registration information, everything they need to get started in the space.

Tongue in cheek, and also completely seriously: partners@alkira.com. If you’re looking to grow your business as a managed service provider – managed network, managed security, managed load balancing, managed DDI, managed connectivity – we’re a really great place to start. Because it’s never unpopular to walk into a customer and solve their problem quickly and say, “I can help you with X, Y, and Z, and I can do it in the next couple of hours – and that’s going to drive a total cost of ownership savings of 40 to 70%.” Nobody ever kicks you out of the office when you say something like that.

Robert Dutt: Amazing. Doug, I appreciate you taking the time. Thank you very much.

Doug Houghton: Robert, thank you for the engaging conversation. I hope your listeners get some good stuff out of it.

Robert Dutt: There you have it – Doug Houghton from Alkira.

I’d like to thank Doug for his time, and honestly for being one of the more entertaining guests I’ve had on in a while. “Networking is not sexy until it doesn’t work” is a line I’m going to be thinking about for a while.

Thanks to you for listening as well. If this conversation sparked something – whether it’s curiosity about NIaaS, the AI infrastructure angle, or what roughly 20% total margin on a $500,000 average deal could do for your business – Doug made it easy for you to take the next step. Drop a note to partners@alkira.com. That’s the front door. And from what I heard today, they will absolutely get back to you.

Here’s the thing that stuck with me most in this conversation: the argument that the AI moment isn’t just a software or services play. It’s going to force a reckoning with network infrastructure that a lot of organizations have been deferring for years. The partners who treat that reckoning as an opportunity rather than a fire drill are probably going to look very smart in about three years.

If you’re finding the In The Channel podcast from ChannelBuzz.ca useful, the best thing you can do is follow or subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. We’re on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, and most major directories. And if you’re enjoying the show, ratings and reviews are genuinely appreciated – they help other people in the Canadian channel find us.

Until next time, I’m Robert Dutt for ChannelBuzz.ca, and I’ll see you in the channel.

Welcome to The Buzz from ChannelBuzz.ca, I’m Robert Dutt, today is Tuesday, April 28th, and here’s what’s happening in the channel today.

The tech industry has shed more than 100,000 jobs in the first four months of 2026, and artificial intelligence is increasingly being cited as a direct cause rather than a background factor. Meta cut 8,000 positions last week – roughly 10 percent of its global workforce – and Microsoft has made significant cuts as well. What’s notable is how explicitly the reasoning is being framed: Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg described 2026 as the year AI starts to replace workers, not just assist them. Tracking data shows AI is directly driving nearly half of those eliminations, with entry-level and generalized IT roles taking the heaviest hit.

For Canadian solution providers, this lands in your lap in a very practical way. Your customers are watching these headlines, and some of them are going to start asking whether they still need the same level of IT headcount – or the same IT budget. That’s a double-edged conversation: on one side, a risk to managed services contract value; on the other, an opportunity if you can reframe your services around what AI still can’t do, and what happens when it goes wrong.

This one is worth getting ahead of before your customers bring it to you.

Password manager Keeper Security has released version 17.8 of its browser extension, and the headline feature is something called Verify Mode – a real-time credential validation layer that sits at the exact moment a user enters a password into a web form.

The idea is straightforward but the timing is sharp. Rather than flagging a suspicious site after the fact, Verify Mode checks the destination against Keeper’s known vault of saved credentials at the point of entry – before anything is submitted. If the site doesn’t match where that credential is supposed to go, the user gets stopped. The release also includes enhanced browser controls giving administrators tighter oversight over how credentials are accessed and used across a managed environment.

This is a direct response to the adversary-in-the-middle and ClickFix attack patterns that have been climbing the threat charts over the past year – techniques specifically designed to harvest credentials by imitating legitimate login pages. For MSPs managing credential hygiene across SMB clients, a control that operates at the human layer rather than the network layer is worth understanding. The weakest link hasn’t changed – this just puts a check on it at the moment it matters most.

Automation platform provider Pia has announced the launch of Pia Chat, a new application built directly into Microsoft Teams that aims to significantly reduce the time required to resolve client issues. The platform uses an AI Resolution Assist feature to handle incoming requests and guides users to specific SmartForms. Pia is positioning the tool as a way to enable zero-touch resolution, allowing service desks to close routine tickets in a matter of seconds without requiring human intervention. For requests that do require deeper technical expertise, the platform escalates the ticket to a technician with the full context already attached, eliminating the need for repetitive back-and-forth communication. The integration addresses a common source of operational drag for MSPs: the constant context switching between communication channels and professional services automation tools. By keeping the entire interaction lifecycle within Teams, the platform aims to cut down on human error, reduce bloated ticket queues, and free up technician time for higher-value, billable work.

Later today on In The Channel, we’re talking about why networking is not sexy until it doesn’t work. Doug Houghton, director of global channels at Alkira, joins the show to discuss Network Infrastructure as a Service and why legacy networks simply weren’t designed for the elasticity demanded by today’s AI workloads.

And if you haven’t heard it yet, yesterday’s episode features a look at the GTIA Innovate Awards with Carolyn April. We dig into why the channel needs to move beyond AI tinkering and proof-of-concepts toward strategic, revenue-generating deployments.

That’s how we’re seeing the headlines today. I’m Robert Dutt for ChannelBuzz.ca, thanks for listening. Have a great day.

Welcome to The Buzz from ChannelBuzz.ca, I’m Robert Dutt, today is Monday, April 28, 2026, and here’s what’s happening in the channel today.

Up first, A new report should be required reading for anyone in the Canadian IT channel selling security services. CDW Canada, in partnership with IDC, surveyed more than 700 Canadian IT and security professionals, and the numbers are stark.

Cyberattacks on Canadian enterprises surged 80 percent in the past year, with the average organization recording 342 incidents – up from 191 the year before. More than half of respondents – 52 percent – reported an actual breach.

Where the attacks are landing is the important detail for solution providers. Cloud infection rates hit a record 53 percent, up from 41 percent the previous year. Organizations are moving workloads to the cloud without necessarily securing them properly, and attackers have noticed.

The uncomfortable wrinkle in the data: security budgets are at a five-year high, averaging 20 percent of total IT spend. More money going in, more breaches coming out. CDW Canada’s CTO describes it as a “security maturity paradox” – organizations are buying tools, but not necessarily deploying or managing them effectively.

For MSPs and solution providers, that gap between investment and outcome is exactly the conversation your customers need to be having – and now there’s Canadian data to back it up.

Second, If you’re a Microsoft partner, you’ve got roughly three days to get your head around some significant changes to the 365 product lineup – because new bundles are landing this Thursday, May 1st.

Two things to know: Microsoft 365 E7, and Microsoft Agent 365. E7 is a new top-tier enterprise bundle that consolidates advanced security, compliance, and agentic AI capabilities into a single license tier above the existing E5. Microsoft Agent 365 is the company’s packaged answer to selling AI agents to business customers.

There’s a structural channel piece attached to this as well. Microsoft is updating its Frontier Badge and Frontier Distributor designations to align with these new agentic AI products – so if you’re holding or working toward a Frontier badge, the criteria are shifting along with the launch.

The practical reality: your customers are going to hear about this from Microsoft’s marketing engine very shortly, if they haven’t already, and they are going to ask you what it means for them and what it means for their bills. Thursday doesn’t leave a lot of runway, so the time to do your homework on these new SKUs is right now.

And finally, One hire can tell you a lot about where a company is headed. OpenAI has brought on Colleen Kapase as Vice President of Strategic Global Partnerships, and if you’ve been in the IT channel for any length of time, that name is going to ring a bell.

Kapase spent years in senior channel leadership roles at Google Cloud, Snowflake, VMware, and Citrix – consistently building partner ecosystems and go-to-market models that work through resellers and solution providers rather than around them.

Her mandate at OpenAI is to build the company’s partner and channel operation, with a focus on Codex – OpenAI’s AI coding agent – and on creating what the company is calling an “epic” go-to-market model with partners.

This matters because OpenAI has historically moved to market through hyperscaler partnerships and direct enterprise relationships. Bringing in someone with Kapase’s background signals a deliberate shift toward a real channel program – the kind that resellers and MSPs can actually participate in and build practices around.

Whether that ultimately includes meaningful opportunities for Canadian partners remains to be seen – but the direction of travel is worth paying attention to.

Later today on In The Channel, we take a look on the value of the GTIA’s new Innovate Awards as a measuring stick for real, meaningful AI projects in the channel.

And if you missed it on Friday, check out my interview with Erin Gertner on how the company’s big Cisco 360 program update is landing one quarter after its debut.

That’s how we’re seeing the headlines today. I’m Robert Dutt for ChannelBuzz.ca, thanks for listening.

Hello and welcome to In The Channel from ChannelBuzz.ca, bringing news and information to the Canadian IT channel community for the last sixteen years. I’m Robert Dutt, editor of ChannelBuzz.ca, and as always, your host for the show.

Cisco’s 360 Partner Program was a long time coming. Eighteen months of co-development with partners, significant changes to how Cisco recognizes, rewards, and incentivizes its channel, including the end of the Gold designation that partners have built their brands around for more than two decades.

The program launched in January and we’re now at roughly the three-month mark, which means it’s a good time to ask: how’s it actually going?

Erin Gertner is vice president of the Partner Organization and SMB Sales for Cisco Canada, and she was closely involved in rolling 360 out to the Canadian market. We get into what surprised her most about how Canadian partners have responded – and some of the feedback wasn’t what she expected. We talk about what the end of Gold actually means for partners who built their reputation around it, where the incentive math is landing, and what the shift towards rewarding capability depth and lifecycle engagement looks like in practice for partners of all sizes.

There’s also a practical question at the heart of this. If you’re a Canadian partner who’s still figuring out how to position yourself in the new program, what should you be doing right now?

Let’s get right into it. My chat with Erin Gertner.

ROBERT DUTT: Erin, thanks for taking the time. I appreciate it.

ERIN GERTNER: Thank you for having me.

ROBERT DUTT: 360, the partner program – long awaited, rolled out I’m going to say eighteen months or so ago, but has been live now for a quarter. How’s it going? What surprised you on the upside, and what’s been harder in getting the program out there than you expected?

ERIN GERTNER: Yeah, it was a long eighteen months, but I’m glad we did it that way. I was telling somebody yesterday, I think we very intentionally took the hard road on evolving our partner program.

As you’re well aware, our previous partner program had been in place for over twenty years, and was very beloved by our partners. And candidly, it was wildly profitable for many of them. So I think there was a lot of angst in the machine around changes, but there came a time where we really did have to go out and evolve our program as the market has changed.

So we intentionally took the harder road, which was to co-innovate the program with our partners, versus us creating a program and pushing it out to the partner community. Early days, we got a ton of feedback from partners. We certainly made a few mistakes, but I really do think we did a great job listening to feedback from the partners and making adjustments where necessary.

Obviously, the Canadian market is quite different from my peers in the US, as an example – same thing as EMEA and APJC. And it’s hard to make a program that fits for everybody. But I do think we’ve done a good job of creating a model, and having the ability to adjust a model that takes care of the majority of our partners.

What surprised me the most was: we tried to take a really strategic approach in Canada. As I said to my team, my biggest fear at the end of this is that we have partners who say “I wasn’t ready” or “I didn’t know.” And we really operated with that in mind. So our goal was to have the majority of our partner community as ready as they possibly could be, earning either the same, if not more, with us.

We did workshops with all of our partners. We enabled our distributors. We spent a really long time sitting in front of our partner community, helping them understand what investments they would need to make to be successful, as well as what would be the payoff on those investments. Some of the asks around training and other elements of the program did require investment from the partners. So we wanted to make sure we could demonstrate to them that there was a strong outcome – that there was profit to be made should they make those investments alongside us.

The thing that actually surprised me the most is that our partner community in Canada is in very good shape in terms of being able to earn with us in the future. We had some metrics and some targets that we aspired to – a certain percentage of our partners achieving Preferred, for example – and we were able to exceed those metrics.

But actually, the thing that surprised me the most is that a lot of our partners came back to us and said, “I like the accountability you have around our technical capabilities, because a lot of this does center around getting Black Belts, as an example.” And one individual said to us, “Behind the curtains, I don’t know if our team was spending as much time as they needed to on training and maintaining our certification levels. And this has really compelled our team to ensure that they are certified in all the right technologies, and we’re having better conversations with customers.”

So I thought there would be a little more noise in the machine, and there certainly was at different points – we made those adjustments along the way – but the feedback has been overwhelmingly positive from the Canadian community. I think the team did a really good job of making sure we were hand-in-hand with our partners, because their success is so critical to us. We know if they’re not making money with us, they have choices in the market and they won’t continue to lead with Cisco.

ROBERT DUTT: So to that point – CRN in the States surveyed partners heading into the launch and found about 40% were positive, about the same number were in the wait-and-see camp, and very few – I think it was about 7% – were actively unhappy with the way things were looking going into 360. Now that the program’s live and partners have actually had a chance to see their PVI and the incentives and how it all looks to them, have you seen the mood trend in Canada? Have you started to see those wait-and-sees move toward the positive camp, or what are you seeing in terms of that momentum?

ERIN GERTNER: I mean, I think our big partners were sort of a no-brainer. A lot of them had a lot of the skills, depth, and capability that were going to be required to get them into Preferred in all the categories. So a few of them grumbled early on because they had to do a little bit more training and enablement, but they quickly hit the thresholds and they’re all in good shape.

What we’ve actually seen is our distributors took a really strategic approach to our two-tier partners, and they’ve been running a lot of workshops and working hand-in-hand with some of our smaller partners. And we’ve actually seen quite a few new partners come on board because they have the ability to be specialized in certain architectures.

For example, we’ve been recruiting more security partners, and the distis have done a great job of working alongside those security partners to help get them up and running. Because a piece of feedback we used to hear in our old program was: “It’s really hard to earn with you because we don’t want to be a network reseller. That’s not interesting for us. We’re a pure-play security partner and we’d like to continue to be a pure-play security partner. And just because it fits for you, it doesn’t fit for me.”

I think this evolution of the program has allowed partners who are pure-play security partners, or great data centre partners, to come on board and start earning rebate pretty quickly, as well as get the designation so customers know that they are deeply skilled and deeply qualified in that particular architecture.

ROBERT DUTT: From your comments a bit earlier, it sounds like partners who you expected to be hitting Preferred are hitting Preferred, and in some cases folks who you maybe weren’t expecting to hit Preferred are hitting Preferred – which is a nice little bonus. But as PVI becomes the engine of the new model, do you find that Canadian partners are generally landing where they expected?

ERIN GERTNER: Yeah, for the most part. We do have a few partners who do a lot of business with us but are smaller – just have a few employees – and they’re very critical to our business because they serve some small subsegment of the public sector, for example. Those are the corner cases that we’ve been taking back to our global team, and they’ve provided some flexibility in how we treat those partners.

Because again, when we looked at our partner landscape, we wanted to make sure everybody who plays a critical role in how we deliver our business for Cisco Canada was taken care of. For the most part, the program has fit the good majority of our partners in the Canadian landscape. For the ones where there are exceptions, or where the program doesn’t make full sense, we’ve been working with them in the background to try to figure out: can we help make an investment, or can we look at treating some of those partners in a bit of a different way to make sure they’re going to be successful with Cisco and continue to earn with Cisco?

So some of that is still underway, even though the program has already launched. We’re still continuing to tweak it and take feedback.

ROBERT DUTT: VIP was for so long the thing that partners watched most closely – the best indicator of where Cisco thinks we should be pointed. How is CPI, the Cisco Partner Incentive, actually landing now that it’s out there? Before launch, I think anytime you switch something like that, there’s always going to be the “what if we used to get X millions in rebates and now we get half of that?” Now that it’s live, how’s the math working out? And do you find partners are generally at least at parity with where they were with VIP?

ERIN GERTNER: We haven’t gotten to a point where we’ve given anybody a check yet, because we’re still in the infancy of the program. But all the feedback I’ve heard from partners so far – and we have a few partners who sit on our advisory board, so they were early in testing out those calculators and have a really good sense of where they’re going to land – the majority of those partners have said they’re tracking to the same or better from a profitability perspective.

Again, to your point around VIP, it’s always very clear where we’re leaning in and where we’re trying to go as a company based on the back-end rebates and the accelerators that follow alongside that. So I think our partners do have a good understanding of where they need to focus and what the outcome will be of that focus.

So far the feedback has been very positive from the calculator, but I guess we shall see in a few months from now.

ROBERT DUTT: Let’s talk about the end of Gold. It was such a standard for such a long time. It was well understood by partners and I think it was well understood by customers. Longview was one of the first Canadian partners to achieve Preferred in all five of the architectures, but they still flagged some concern with the fact that there’s not an easy way to signal that multi-architecture depth the same way that Gold used to in one easy packaging. For a Canadian partner that’s kind of built their brand around Gold or included that in their messaging, what’s the practical guidance in positioning their expertise to their customers now, especially looking across architectures?

ERIN GERTNER: I think you said part of it in the question, right? The fact that they are the first, and that they are Preferred in all the categories, is actually better than Gold.

I was talking about this to somebody yesterday. What is interesting about Gold – and I was actually on the sales side of our business for the majority of my career – there was always this perception that if you were a Gold partner, you were great at everything. And that was a market perception for a really long time. When in fact, when you pulled back the covers, you could be a Gold partner just by selling a lot of one thing.

So we’ve actually embarked on a marketing campaign that’s been live for a few months now – I think you probably heard about it at Partner Summit – talking about some of the change in our branding. Now when customers are evaluating our partners, or when our account teams are evaluating when to bring in partners, the fact that it’s very clear which partners have the right expertise, the ones who have made the right investments and who’ve got really deep technical depth – that’s now very clear with Preferred status versus what used to be Gold.

I think we still have some market education to do around what it means to be Preferred and the amount of investment that partners need to make to get into Preferred status in each of those architectures. There was quite a bit of chatter at some of the advisory boards about Gold going away and what they felt that meant to their business and their market. But I actually like where this program has gone because their expertise is very clear now, which wasn’t the case with Gold.

ROBERT DUTT: Gold did have this great market perception of being good at everything. It was easy to capture in kind of one word, one concept. But your point there then is that it’s easier with Preferred to express where you’re good and the breadth of that. That’s an interesting takeaway for partners.

The philosophy in the program has shifted even more so than in the previous shift – away from rewarding transaction volume, towards rewarding capability depth and lifecycle engagement. Sounds great conceptually, and I understand why it’s important, but for a partner whose business model has been built around those big infrastructure deals and landing them, what does that transition look like in practice? Is there a smooth ramp to getting that worked into the business, or is there potentially a cliff here?ERIN GERTNER: So it’s a multi-year journey to getting to a true place where our incentive programs are going to be aligned to full lifecycle. The intent of the program is to work with partners to build those skills and capabilities around lifecycle, adoption, managed services, and all the other things we’re asking them to build. But we know for some partners that is a multi-year journey, and that’s okay.

When we look at our back-end rebate structure, we are taking a slower approach. On the surface, we’re asking partners to do all these things with us and come along for the ride – but we are still incenting them very heavily on hardware resale in the near term. We want to make sure they have a very clear path and that they do understand that we’re evolving the business and we’re evolving the way we incent for good reasons. We need to do that. Adoption – especially as software continues to be a larger portion of our overall business – and lifecycle becomes even more critical over time, as well as the renewal business. But we aren’t just flipping a switch.

The intent of this program was never to punish, and it was never meant to save Cisco money. We talked a lot about how partners are so critical to our success – we want to make sure they are continuing to be very profitable with us. So we’re trying to take them on a longer-term journey and we’re not trying to make it hurt.

ROBERT DUTT: The engagement metrics right now are sitting at 90% land and 5% each to adopt and renew. I think Tim Coogan has said that that will shift over time as the market dictates, but how fast do you see that coming? Should partners be building those adopt-and-renew muscles now in anticipation of the bigger shift, or is there still some runway there?

ERIN GERTNER: I would say we need to get started now. Some of those certifications take a year or two, and building those practices – for partners who have historically sold hardware, building out an adoption practice – I mean, we did it, and it took us a couple of years to get that up and running. So building out those practices is really critical for partners.

What’s interesting about this program is that we had partners asking us to shift away from paying solely on hardware, because they were saying, “You’re asking us to go out and do all this extra work with customers to help them deliver the outcomes they’re looking for. We should be incentivized around that as well.”

So I would say: get started now. I don’t think I can speak to when our back-end programs are going to shift more to adoption and renew, because nobody has shared that with me. I’m not sure we even know – I think we want to see where our partners are on the journey.

But I would say get started now. Get yourself in a place where that makes sense. And candidly, you’re going to yield better outcomes from your customers and better renewal rates if you’ve got a great practice around that.

I was talking to a partner a few weeks ago who said, “We love the whole adoption motion. It has us having conversations we’ve never had with customers, and we’re much closer to the executives at our customer base because we’re talking about use cases and talking about whether we’re seeing success or whether we need to pivot. We’re having quarterly touchpoints and QBRs talking about whether or not what we sold them is working and they’re seeing value from it.”

So I think it’s a good motion for partners to build regardless. It will drive a different level of engagement and conversation with their customers. When we’re going to fully incentivize around it, I’m not entirely sure – but I know it’s coming. Be ready, start building that expertise now. There’s hopefully limited downside to doing so.

ROBERT DUTT: One of the things that analysts have noted about the program change is that it’s really a bet on skills first – that partner value is measured by what you can do, not how much you sell. That’s a big cultural shift, not just a programmatic one. Acknowledging that there are going to be some partners who are maybe a little bit behind the curve, and some who are ahead of you saying “what took you so long?” – how far along are Canadian partners in making that mental shift themselves?

ERIN GERTNER: I can feel [they’re] pretty far along. I think it was a bit of a shock early on because we never had any accountability in our programs around maintaining certification levels and technical depth. But our best partners have great technical expertise and a really strong understanding of our solutions and what they can deliver to customers.

And as I said earlier, some of the feedback we’re getting from partners is, “I’m glad you’re doing this – it’s holding us accountable to making sure we’re staying on top of the solutions.” Our portfolio has moved so quickly over the last couple of years. Our best partners are the ones who have great understanding of the technology and what it can deliver. So I think early on there was a little hesitation from some partners around that, but the feedback has been overwhelmingly positive in the last little while.

ROBERT DUTT: Let’s talk about SMB. The Canadian channel in market skews toward small and mid-size, and this happens to roll into your line of work as well. I’m seeing two different takes on what 360 means for smaller partners. Tiffani Bova from Futurum warned that smaller or resource-constrained partners may be sort of specialized out of the ecosystem. But Cisco’s analysis with Techaisle argues that 360 dismantles the bias toward big partners. Those are two very different reads. I’m curious what you’re seeing in the market in Canada and what’s closer to the truth in practice.

ERIN GERTNER: It’s so funny when you ask – we were joking about this yesterday on a call. When you ask one set of partners, they’ll say 360 was created for the big partners. And then you ask another set of partners, they’ll say 360 was created for the small partners. So it was really created for everybody.

I think the distis have done a really good job of leaning in with some of our SMB partners and helping them figure out where they want to play and what they need to do to be successful. They also have a lot that they can bring to bear to some of the smaller partners – for example, they’ve got a really good EA practice, and they can help augment some of those skill sets that are required for the SMB partner.

So if there is an SMB partner out there that wants to work with us, distis are really well equipped to help them get on board. And we’ve also got some incentives, programs, and specializations that are offered specifically for the SMB market.

Still, a good majority of our business happens with our big partners, but also through that two-tier channel and distribution. And we need those partners to be successful alongside us. We’ve made a lot of investments to ensure that’s the case.

Is it going to be perfect for everybody? Maybe, maybe not. But we certainly did craft the program to make sure that SMB would have an equal chance at success.

ROBERT DUTT: One of the big promises of 360 is that managed services is now treated as a standard earning motion rather than kind of an exception to the rules. How’s that landing? Are you seeing Canadian MSPs that have their operational maturity and lifecycle engagement reflected in PVI, or is there still friction to be resolved there?

ERIN GERTNER: I think it looks a little bit different, but we actually are seeing a lot of our partners go out and build Cisco Partner-Powered managed services, which I love. Due to the shift in 360, I was working with a partner a few weeks ago who’s building out a managed Meraki practice, and we’re also seeing a lot of partners starting to build up managed security with us as well.

Going through the certifications can be a little bit cumbersome, but we’ve also made quite a few investments in our partners to help ease some of that transition – especially partners who are building really great, highly relevant managed services for SMBs or for any customer base. We’re trying to offset the cost or do what we can to help them through that journey, because I know in some instances it is a heavy lift.

But the focus around managed services has actually been really good. Partners are getting thoughtful around where they can deliver value to their customer base, where there’s opportunity, and they’re coming to us proactively to build, which I love.

ROBERT DUTT: One of the neat things about the program is the fact that Meraki CMNA and CMSS certifications now actually count towards Black Belt, and that’s an important part of the program. CMNA, CMSS – it feels like a big deal for SMB-focused partners. Are you seeing Canadian partners taking advantage of that pathway and getting represented better because they have those certifications?

ERIN GERTNER: Again, everybody’s path looks a little bit different. I was just working with a small partner who’s going out and getting his CCNA and getting himself certified so he can improve his PVI score. And that’s been awesome. Having more technical people at our partners who know a lot about Cisco has been an interesting journey for them.

He was sort of grumbling a little bit at the beginning doing it, and then he said [it was rewarding [? – unclear in audio**]], being able to have a little more depth to conversations when he’s sitting in front of a customer. So we’re seeing partners take all different types of paths to get to where they need to be from a certification perspective. But again, it is certainly holding them accountable and encouraging them to get more technical depth and capability into their organization, which ultimately will serve the customer better over time.

ROBERT DUTT: The Secure AI Infrastructure specialization drove three times the enrollment of any previous specialization, from what I’ve read. What does that tell you about where partner investment is heading? Is there a risk that everyone rushes toward AI and neglects the bread-and-butter networking and security competencies? Or are we pretty much so well entrenched there that there’s the opportunity to build into the next thing and still defend the home base?

ERIN GERTNER: I keep saying to partners: there’s no AI without a network. And when we left Partner Summit, I had three partners come up and say to me, “That was my biggest aha moment of this whole thing.” Even if you’re not selling Cisco servers – which we encourage them all to do – whatever you’re doing is built on the foundation of a secure network.

So I love that people are gravitating more toward AI, because it does pull through. If I go back to the days of IP telephony, we used to joke when I was in the field, if somebody bought a phone, it pulled through PoE ports – I think AI is going to be the same opportunity for a lot of our partners. It’s going to pull through observability, it’s going to pull through security, it’s going to pull through networking. So I almost think those things very much go hand in hand together, versus standing on their own and being autonomous.

ROBERT DUTT: Finally, if you’re a Canadian partner listening to this and you’ve been in the program and getting used to it for coming up on a quarter now – what’s the one thing you should be doing right now to position yourself as the program matures? What’s the one thing you can differentiate yourself by year end?

ERIN GERTNER: That’s a great question. I think it’s going to end up being a few things.

One: make sure you have a good understanding of the program and how it works. Because again, it was intended to make sure our partners are making money working with Cisco. Profitability is number one for us in the channel. We value our partners so much. I have a partner who always jokes, “The thing I love about working with Cisco is you guys always ask us about our profitability” – and we really do care deeply and immensely about the profitability of our partners.

So to your point around VIP, you can always sort of tell where Cisco is going. I hope all of our partners have a pretty good understanding of where we are going – and if you don’t, reach out to us directly or to our distributors.

If you follow the bouncing ball on that one, make sure you are leading with a secure networking conversation, and make sure whoever you’re working with has a lot of depth and knowledge in how to leverage the program and how to work within the confines of it.

Go out there and be loud and proud of where you are with your PVI score and where you are focusing from an architecture perspective. We love that there’s a really large breadth of partners who are good at many things, or really good at one or two things – and that works for us. Again, if you need help to be successful, reach out to our teams, because we love working with our channel partners.

ROBERT DUTT: All right. Erin, thanks for taking the time, and congratulations on getting the program out there, getting it launched, getting it established. Good luck on quarter two and beyond.

ERIN GERTNER: Thank you. Thank you for the conversation. I really enjoyed that.

ROBERT DUTT:There you have it – Erin Gertner from Cisco Canada.

I’d like to thank Erin for her time on this one. A few things worth sitting with.

The feedback from the Canadian partner community has apparently been more positive than even Cisco expected – including partners who said they actually appreciated being held accountable to their certification levels because it gave them internal cover to make the training investments they knew they should have been making anyway. That’s a more honest answer than most vendor channel chiefs would volunteer.

The other thing I’d keep in mind: the incentive structure is still heavily weighted toward hardware resale in the near term – 90% land, 5% adopt, 5% renew. But Erin was pretty clear that the shift towards adoption and managed services is coming. The timeline just isn’t set. Her advice was simple: start building those muscles now, because it takes a couple of years to get an adoption practice up and running. Don’t wait till the incentives force your hand.

If you’re enjoying the In The Channel podcast, you can find us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, and most podcast directories. Follow, subscribe, leave a rating and review if you’re feeling generous – it all helps.

Until next time, I’m Robert Dutt for ChannelBuzz.ca, and I’ll see you in the channel.

Welcome to The Buzz from ChannelBuzz.ca, I’m Robert Dutt, today is Friday, April 24, 2026, and here’s what’s happening in the channel today.

First up: Acronis has launched Acronis GenAI Protection, a new managed service offering aimed  squarely at MSPs.

What it does is give service providers centralized visibility and control over generative AI usage across client environments. That means shadow AI discovery – finding out which AI tools employees are actually using, sanctioned or not. It means prompt injection blocking, so bad actors can’t use AI tools to manipulate systems or exfiltrate data through a chat interface. And it means sensitive data protection: preventing PII, PHI, and confidential business information from getting fed into tools that were never cleared to receive it. MSPs can set and enforce AI usage policies on a per-client basis, all from inside the existing Acronis Cyber Protect Cloud console – no separate point solution to manage or sell.

Acronis president Gaidar Magdanurov is positioning this explicitly as a revenue expansion opportunity – the idea being that MSPs can convert an invisible risk their clients already have into a billable managed service line. The market backdrop supports that framing: Omdia analyst Matthew Ball estimates that more than half of SMBs are already using AI tools regardless of IT approval, and for the most part there is no governance layer in place to manage that usage.

This is the first release under Acronis’s broader Cyber Workspace initiative, with more capabilities – AI-native threat detection, deeper workspace monitoring – described as coming. Worth evaluating now. For most MSP client bases, the shadow AI governance conversation is already overdue.

Second: Everpure – the company formerly known as Pure Storage – CEO Charles Giancarlo published an open letter to customers and partners today that anyone selling or speccing hardware needs to read carefully. The headline number is a 70 percent average price increase since the beginning of 2026 – and Giancarlo’s message is that this may not normalize for years, not quarters.

The underlying cause is AI infrastructure buildout consuming semiconductor supply at a pace that’s starving conventional storage and compute components. Everpure’s own input costs – CPUs, DRAM, and flash storage – have surged between 300 and 900 percent from mid-2025 baseline levels. Costs roughly doubled between December and January alone, then doubled or tripled again through February and March. Giancarlo is explicit that the company is absorbing a significant share of those increases rather than passing them straight through – it’s operating at the low end of its 65 to 70 percent gross margin range as a result – and the letter commits explicitly to not treating the supply crisis as a margin opportunity. That’s worth acknowledging. But absorbing part of a 300-to-900 percent input cost spike still leaves a 70 percent average increase landing on customers.

The channel-specific implications are concrete. Quote validity has been cut from 60 to 90 days down to 30, because costs are moving too fast for longer windows to hold. And Giancarlo’s warning about multi-year disruption applies broadly – the underlying DRAM and flash component dynamics affect the whole hardware market, not just Everpure’s product line. If you have proposals in flight with any significant storage or compute components, pressure-test those numbers now and get ahead of the conversation with your clients before they come to you.

And third, something from the longer end of the technology horizon: Cisco has announced a Universal Quantum Switch – a working research prototype that addresses one of the foundational barriers to practical quantum networking.

Here’s the core problem it solves. Quantum computers from different vendors encode information in fundamentally different ways – polarization, time-bin, frequency-bin, path encoding – and until now, connecting them has meant destroying the quantum information in the process. There’s been no equivalent of a network switch for quantum systems. Cisco’s prototype changes that with a patented conversion engine that can route and translate between all of those encoding types simultaneously, preserving the quantum state across the translation. It operates at room temperature on standard telecom fiber – no exotic cryogenic infrastructure required. In testing, it achieved less than four percent quantum information degradation, with sub-nanosecond switching at under one milliwatt of power.

The analogy Cisco uses is instructive: classical networking switches made the internet possible by connecting incompatible endpoints through a common network fabric. This is the same concept applied to quantum systems. The company is working with IBM, Qunnect, and Atom Computing toward a fuller quantum network stack.

To be direct about where this fits for the channel: it’s a research prototype and it won’t appear on a quote sheet this year or next. But for those with public sector, defence, or financial services accounts where quantum is starting to surface in security and infrastructure conversations, the practical timeline on distributed quantum networking is compressing faster than the industry has generally been tracking. This is meaningful progress, and it’s worth knowing about.

Later today on In The Channel, we’ll be discussing Cisco 360, three months in with Cisco Canada channel chief Erin Gertner, and looking at why Canadian partners are responding better than expected to the program’s rollout.

And if you haven’t heard it yet, yesterday’s episode features Dell Technologies vice president of global partner marketing Eric Arcese discussing the AI Factory and why the gaps around it are the real opportunity for the channel.

That’s how we’re seeing the headlines today. I’m Robert Dutt for ChannelBuzz.ca, thanks for listening. Have a great day, and an even better weekend.

Hello and welcome to In The Channel from ChannelBuzz.ca, bringing news and information to the Canadian IT channel community for the last 16 years. I’m Robert Dutt, editor of ChannelBuzz.ca, and your host for the show.

Dell Technologies World is coming up in May, and for the Dell partner community, it’s the biggest event on the calendar – the place where the direction for the partner program gets set for the year ahead. As we head toward that, there’s a lot for Canadian resellers and MSPs to be thinking about. The partner program has been evolving. The shift from VxRail to Dell Private Cloud is still very much unfolding. The AI infrastructure opportunity is reshaping what customers expect and what partners are expected to deliver. The question of where a Canadian MSP or VAR actually fits into all of that – that’s a real and pressing one.

To help me make sense of it, I sat down with Eric Arcese, Vice President of Global Partner Marketing at Dell Technologies. Eric’s been in the industry for over 25 years, with roots going back to the EMC era, so he’s been watching and shaping how the Dell partner ecosystem operates for a long time. We talked about where partners fit in the AI story, the VxRail transition, the AI PC refresh, and what you can expect from the Global Partner Summit in May.

Let’s get right into it, my chat with Eric Arcese.

Robert Dutt: Eric, thanks for taking the time. I appreciate it.

Eric Arcese: Thanks, Robert, for having me.

Robert Dutt: You’re the Vice President of Global Partner Marketing at Dell. Can you give me a sense of what that actually means day-to-day? What are you responsible for, and what does the Dell partner community look like from where you’re sitting?

Eric Arcese: Well, the partner community has been a tremendous growth engine and a critical and existential part of our go-to-market in everything that we do. We have partners around the world, we have some of our very best in Canada, and our partners really bring our technology to life with our shared customers around the world. We can’t do what we do in the market without the phenomenal partners that we have.

In my role leading global partner marketing, that is to make sure that our story resonates, that we’re bringing that value proposition to life for our partners. They have choices, just like customers do, each and every day – who they’re going to invest in, who they’re going to work with, what they’re going to focus on learning, how they’re going to enable their sellers, their pre-sales folks. And we want to make sure that our partners feel really good about working with us, building businesses with us, developing practices with us, and ultimately growing with us in the markets that they serve for the customers that we collectively support.

I love what I do. I’ve been in tech for over 25 years, here at Dell for over 25 years as well, and I could not think of a place I would rather be. Supporting our very best partners in Canada and around the world, and all that we do – that’s a little bit about what I do. I work very closely with my team around the world, and with our regional marketing folks as well, to make sure that that last mile of what we deliver for partners is well-aligned and adds value to partners in the ecosystem. So that’s a little bit about what I do, Robert.

Robert Dutt: I feel like 2026 is a bit of an inflection point for the partner community writ large, and the definition of a Dell partner seems broader than it’s ever been. You’ve talked about partners moving beyond reselling into being architects, advisors, ecosystem builders – all that kind of good stuff. What do you see as the state of the Dell partner community right now, and how have you seen that picture change over recent months, and I guess the last year or two?

Eric Arcese: Robert, you and I have both been in tech for the last couple of decades, and there have been different chapters, different inflection points. What we’re seeing now is a moment like we’ve never seen before. This is obviously all driven by AI, but it puts infrastructure, solutions, integrations, and outcomes at the forefront of everything that our partners deliver and everything our customers are demanding. So we’re in this moment that’s existential in tech and everything that we do, where we need to accelerate time to value with infrastructure.

And when it really dawned on me, Robert – it was a couple of years ago, at a Dell Technologies World; you might have been there too. We had this announcement, and we called it the AI Factory

with NVIDIA. And we had a picture on a slide – like so many of you have seen, with a chevron – data coming in on one side, use cases and business outcomes on the other, but layered through all of that, you had services, AI, software, infrastructure. And there were gaps when I saw this slide, and I was thinking to myself: the gaps, the seams, that’s where the opportunity lies for our partners around the world.

Dell is the infrastructure provider of choice. We are the leader in everything that we provide – right from commercial PCs, to storage, to servers, AI servers – and stitching it all together through the topology upon which we develop those outcomes creates a huge opportunity for our partners. So that’s what gets me really excited about the moment. We’re meeting the moment. Our technology is meeting the moment, our partners are meeting the moment, and we’re working each and every day with those partners to deliver real AI-driven outcomes around the world.

And some customers get it – and those that don’t, won’t be here very long. So there is this urgency, and we see that in our demand across the board. And I won’t go into earnings from last year, but you’ve probably seen that the year that we just posted, we’re seeing that come to life in every market. We’re seeing that in Canada, no doubt about it as well. It’s hard not to get excited about it. This is a very special time indeed.

Robert Dutt: So the AI Factory – definitely been a centrepiece of the story for the last couple of years, as you point out. When I look at it from the perspective of my audience – from the MSP or the VAR serving mid-market and SMB customers – the massive GPU cluster buildouts feel like they’re kind of happening somewhere else. Can you help me fill in the story for the regional partner who isn’t doing hyperscale deployments and where they fit into the AI infrastructure story at this point?

Eric Arcese: It’s a great question. I think that’s a little bit of the elephant in the room, right? The first couple of years, it’s like – yeah, you’re reading about these multi-billion-dollar deals, but where are they happening? And those deals were happening at the hyperscale level. The next question is: when is there enterprise AI adoption? When does a traditional enterprise customer really start embracing AI at every level?

And you know what? We’re seeing that now. The trajectory of that growth is accelerating, and it’s terrific to see. To your point, Robert, those first couple of quarters, first year or two – the question was: what about enterprise adoption? And that’s where our partners are incredibly well positioned to make it real. What are the outcomes? What are the use cases? What are the business processes we’re going to focus on to bring that infrastructure to a place where it’s adding real value? The people in that workflow who make that real – that’s our partners. Dell’s partners.

Because our partners in Canada are incredibly intimate with the industry, the customer, the use cases, the business priorities – whether it’s in the public or private sector. We’re providing that infrastructure at Dell Technologies, but our partners are making it real because they have that intimacy. They’re pressing the flesh, they’re working with customers each and every day, they know what those priorities are, and they can reconcile where those investments need to be made to help accelerate time to value.

So with all of that comes a massive services and consulting opportunity. It’s not just the infrastructure – it’s the value-added services that our partners are building upon that infrastructure. And we’re seeing some terrific practices getting built with our partners around the world. When we work together, we win together, and we’re seeing that each and every day.

Robert Dutt: Can you make that just a little bit more concrete for me? What are the consulting-type services you see partners bringing to bear right now – especially for that partner serving, let’s say, a 500-person financial services firm? Just to set an example of a mid-market-type opportunity where there may be an AI Factory angle, but it’s not the hyperscale wheelhouse.

Eric Arcese: You know, if you think about it – four or five years ago, you and I would be having this conversation and it would be about a cloud-first model, and then we’d probably evolve into hybrid cloud, using public or private cloud based on the right workload. Now the way we think about it, it’s not a cloud-first model. It’s more around data. It’s the data model. Making sure we have the right data on the right workload, because if you plug an LLM or any AI-driven workload or a GPU behind suboptimal data, you’re going to get suboptimal outcomes.

So when we think about where a partner is going to focus – irrespective of the industry, whether it’s public sector, banking, telco, manufacturing – I think starting with a real inventory of what that data topology looks like, and what the business outcome is that we’re looking to achieve. And no matter what industry the customer is from, one quickly realizes they’re all in the data business.

Our partners can, number one, do a great assessment of where that critical data is and where it’s living. And number two, marry that data to the right business outcome in terms of what they’re trying to deploy. So I think it really starts with the data, and building practices that understand the workload, the industry, the vertical, and the data – that is key. And that creates a lot of opportunity. We talk about servers, storage, client, PCs, and networking all the time, but that is where that data is going to live, and we’re going to build that AI practice off of it.

That initial assessment – where an AI practice starts – all begins with data, Robert. It’s really having that data-informed conversation. And then a lot of this is a change in mindset, in terms of what you’re doing with that data and what the expectations are.

Robert Dutt: All right. From one reference architecture to another – talk about the transition from VxRail to Dell Private Cloud. Michael Dell’s been pretty direct about the direction. And I know you have roots going back to EMC, so it might be a bit personal. But for a partner who’s built a real practice, a real business, around VxRail over the last decade – what does that transition actually look like, and where do you see the services opportunity opening up as customers make that move?

Eric Arcese: Robert, it’s such a great question. Because for years we talked about converged infrastructure, hyperconverged infrastructure – packaging, which made a lot of sense. You package a pre-architected and engineered system and you deliver it, to drive an accelerated business outcome. Time to value of infrastructure. The industry, with our partners, built a multi-billion-dollar business and a new market that was very well received.

Then you wake up a couple of years later and now we’re talking about disaggregated infrastructure with Dell Private Cloud. And one may wonder: wait a second – we thought it was all about putting it all together and delivering it with speed. What’s changed?

And I had to ask myself the same question, Robert. What’s changed? Well, the economics of AI have changed. The centre of gravity in terms of what is needed for these AI outcomes has been driven by a huge development – and that development is the GPU. The GPU is the accelerator of all the processing. And sometimes you need more GPU investment than you would need in storage, than you would need in client. You still need them across the board. So when you think about that economic backdrop of AI, the economics lend themselves to a more disaggregated infrastructure where you can dial up storage, server, networking, depending on what is needed for that specific workload, LLM, or AI platform that you’re rolling out.

Also – customers want choice. They don’t want to be locked into one hypervisor. Maybe they want to work with Red Hat. Maybe they want to work with Microsoft. Maybe they want to work with VMware – they’re a VMware shop. Maybe they want to work with Nutanix. Allowing customers to have that choice empowers them, but it also creates opportunity for our partners, to your point, Robert. Because our partners are ultimately going to help our shared customers navigate those choices and reconcile those priorities from a hypervisor perspective, to optimize whatever application they’re rolling out.

So it’s really about customer choice. And for me, the coolest thing to see is how quickly this has evolved. We’re doubling down on customer choice. Partners earn up to 10% incremental incentives. We’ve really built a program to drive profitable practices around Dell Private Cloud and strengthen and deepen those relationships. So we’re seeing this real shift from pre-packaged hyperconverged infrastructure to disaggregated infrastructure that’s truly optimized and tailored to Dell Private Cloud. Very exciting to see, Robert.

Robert Dutt: Pivoting to the device side of things – the AI PC refresh is a significant cycle for the channel right now. For the Canadian VAR or even an MSP selling into the commercial market, what’s the marketing story that you’re giving them to make that conversation land? Especially with customers who are already stretched on IT budgets and might be looking at that three-year-old PC and saying, “good enough to get me through another year.”

Eric Arcese: It might be. But it probably isn’t. And it’s not just the productivity benefits you’re going to see with an AI PC – it’s the security requirements that we’re all going to need. Because AI is terrific for the good, but it has also empowered the bad actors to get to where we work every day.

Last year was all about the tech refresh from Windows 10 to Windows 11. We still have over 500 million PCs running Windows 10, and enterprise fleets averaging three to five years of age. So customers definitely need to act on that – to bring that AI capability to the edge, but also to meet the security requirements we need to protect that edge from reaching into the core.

We started naturally in the data centre in our conversation today, Robert, but that edge – where are you working every day? What are you touching every day? It’s your PC. That’s your workforce. That’s what’s in front of you, whether at work or at home. And there’s just a tremendous opportunity there for our partners.

We’re the number one commercial PC provider in the world, and it starts with what’s in front of you each and every day. We’re excited about that opportunity. That hasn’t gone away. We had a terrific CES, and there’s just more greenfield opportunity for our partners in Canada to win with Dell’s PC portfolio.

Robert Dutt: Bouncing around a little bit from topic to topic here – you guys made some program changes for 2026, as most vendors are wont to do from time to time. The Titanium incentives probably being the most visible of them, but there’s also this broader “simplified, predictable, profitable” philosophy underneath it. From a marketing standpoint, what’s the message you most want partners to internalize about what Dell is committing to this year?

Eric Arcese: One of the things I love about partner marketing, Robert, is the work is never over. And you can appreciate that – you’ve been in the channel just as long as I have. The work of creating a simple, predictable, profitable motion for our partners really never ends, because everything we talked about just keeps evolving.

We want to make sure we have a simplified motion – taking friction out of the system. We want to make sure it’s predictable: you know what you’re going to get, you know how we’re going to engage with you. And it’s profitable: you want to make sure that you’re making money working with Dell Technologies in Canada.

So we’re doing a lot around demand signals – how do we accelerate what used to be a lead, which is now a demand signal, the outcome of many different predictive analytics and data points on the markets that we serve with our partners. We want to make sure we’re simplifying that lead management and fostering seamless collaboration in that motion.

We also want to make sure that from a deal reg perspective, we are managing opportunities together and protecting where our Canadian partners have invested. We want to do all of that to accelerate engagement, simplify processes, and empower our Dell sellers with a smarter and streamlined motion. And then quoting and buying – we want to make sure we are priced to win across the board, and we’re building a modern, partner-centric transaction ecosystem that connects product discovery to order management in one end-to-end platform. You’re going to be hearing more and more about that in the months to come. I think you’ll be at Dell Technologies World with us, so I’m excited to share more there.

That mantra of simple, predictable, profitable – that work never ends. We’re seeing the fruits of our labour here and the success we’ve had in Canada over the last couple of years. And we’re really proud of the work that we’ve done. We’re very grateful and humbled by so many amazing partners in Canada that have really doubled down on Dell across the board, across the portfolio. Because when you have a great program that rewards the right investment, and you have wonderful people – I love the alliteration of portfolio, program, people – there’s nothing you can’t do. When we work together, we truly are winning together in Canada.

Robert Dutt: To your point that it never ends – it just keeps evolving. You rightly pointed out we’re not too far away from Dell Technologies World, and the Global Partner Summit is a big part of that. There’s been some preview of a new integrated partner experience that sounds like it goes beyond a typical program update. Without asking you to scoop your own announcements – although if you want to, please feel free.

Eric Arcese: Ha – I’ll be good. I’ll do my best.

Robert Dutt: What’s the problem you’re aiming to solve for partners with this platform approach? What’s the philosophy behind what we’re likely to see roll out in the near future?

Eric Arcese: What we talked about – meeting the moment – it is a truly special time. And we want to make sure our partners have the speed to deliver what we collectively need to for our shared customers, and the scale to do it across every market, across every part of our portfolio, across every partner type.

What you’ll see at Dell Technologies World – as you always do – is the product of investments we’ve made over not just the year, but over years. From a portfolio perspective, programmatically, you’re going to see how when partners invest and build their practices and businesses on Dell, they will be rewarded. And then you get to spend time with our people who support our partners in Canada and around the world. Not to mention, we have a great time in Vegas, as one always does.

So it’s the place to be. We’re a couple of weeks out and we’re seeing the excitement and anticipation building. We have a lot to share at our Global Partner Summit at Dell Technologies World. Robert, I believe you’re planning on being there – we’re looking forward to seeing you and spending time with you as well. And we’re going to have a great representation not just of Canadian partners but the Canadian customers we work so hard serving each and every day. It’s going to be a blast, as it always is.

Robert Dutt: You touched a while back on some of the day-to-day operational things that partners tell me they feel the most friction on – not specific to Dell, but across the industry. Deal reg, quoting, lead sharing, the need to do all of that faster at higher scale. Is the vision here to make those kinds of operational experiences meaningfully more autonomous and self-serve? Is AI in the partner platform something partners will feel starting in May, or is that still on the horizon?

Eric Arcese: Well, I prefer drinking your own champagne to eating your own dog food – so I’ll go with the bubbly analogy there. But we have very much been, for years now, investing in a very big way in our partner business and the platforms that support those partners. We want to make sure that we’re using an AI-first approach across the board in everything that we do – to take friction out of the system, and to have an AI-first mantra in all we do when it comes to empowering our people and our partners.

I look at the AI that we’re investing in to support our partners as a real force multiplier. How do you get the power of the portfolio to our customers? How do you enable our partners to know that portfolio? How do you make sure that when you’re quoting and ordering, you’re doing that in the most efficient way – so that customers aren’t waiting, they’re getting the right configuration at the right time, for the right workload, at the price that makes the most sense, and we’re delivering value? We want partners to be able to deliver that value, because when they do, they grow – and when they grow, it’s good for our partners, it’s good for Dell, and ultimately we’re driving more outcomes for the customers we serve.

So you’ll see a lot of that AI in what we deliver from a product perspective, but definitely in how AI supports things like syndicated content, quoting and buying, and all of the programmatic platform upon which our partnerships are built.

Robert Dutt: My last question – you touched on 25 or more years in this industry, through the EMC years, through the Dell-EMC merger, and now we’re into the AI chapter. For a partner who’s navigating all of this right now – the infrastructure shifts, the AI opportunity, the evolution of the program – what’s your read on the best opportunity over the next 12 months? Where would you be pointing partners in terms of where to focus?

Eric Arcese: Well, if you’re a partner thinking about which relationships you’re going to invest in – with Dell, you have a leader in commercial PCs, a leader in storage, a leader in services. You have the industry heavyweight in infrastructure. And not only that – in a world where we’re seeing some very complicated supply chain dynamics globally, you have the world’s best supply chain supporting you. You have a proven leader that’s committed to partnering in all that we do. And you have tremendous people in Canada there to support you each and every day.

So I always think of it this way: if you’re building a business, who are those partnerships you want to create? You want one hand to shake that’s accountable to you, that’s invested in you, that’s committed to you – so that you can deliver on what you’ve promised your customer. With Dell, you have that. And we’re really proud of where we are in the market.

This AI moment that we’ve all been afforded is going to create tremendous opportunity – and I couldn’t be more excited about it. Not just for the partner businesses we support, but for the outcomes and problem statements that we’re going to be able to address that we haven’t even fathomed yet. Transformative outcomes across every industry we serve, both public and private. So I’m really excited, Robert. And if I’m a partner, those are the types of things I’m thinking about and why working with Dell is a great bet. And hopefully we’ll all be making that bet in Vegas in May at Dell Technologies World – because that’s what you do in Vegas. You make bets. But it’s an easy one to make with Dell Technologies every day.

Robert Dutt: Great point to leave it on. I look forward to catching up at Dell Technologies World and hearing more of the story there. Eric, thanks so much.

Eric Arcese: Thanks so much, Robert. I really enjoyed our time together. Much appreciated.

There you have it – Eric Arcese from Dell Technologies.

I’d like to thank Eric for his time, and of course, thank you for listening today.

If I had to pull three things out of the conversation for the Canadian partner to sit with, here’s what I’m thinking.

First – the AI Factory framing. Eric described looking at the AI Factory topology slide and seeing the gaps, the seams between the components, as the partner opportunity. The hardware is Dell’s story. The services layer, the data work, the integration, the outcomes – that’s where partners play. If you’re trying to figure out what the AI infrastructure wave actually means to your practice, that’s a useful lens.

Second – the VxRail transition. If you’ve built a practice around VxRail, Dell’s message is: the path forward is clear. The hypervisor choice you’ve made is preserved. The economics of the new platform make sense, and there are meaningful incentives to help you build out a Dell Private Cloud practice. The transition is underway and getting ahead of it matters.

Third – the AI PC refresh is a security story as much as a productivity story. There are still around 500 million PCs running Windows 10, many of them three to five years old, sitting at the edge of the network while AI is making the threat landscape more sophisticated. For MSPs already in the endpoint security conversation with their customers, that’s a more powerful entry point than “it’s a faster laptop.”

And of course – Dell Technologies World, May 18th to 21st in Las Vegas. The Global Partner Summit is the anchor event for partners, and based on what Eric was hinting at around the integrated partner experience and changes to quoting and deal registration, it’s worth watching closely whether you’re going or not.

If you found this useful, follow or subscribe to the In The Channel podcast wherever you get your podcasts – we’re on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, and most major directories. A rating or review is always appreciated if you’ve got a minute – it genuinely helps.

Until next time, I’m Robert Dutt for ChannelBuzz.ca, and I’ll see you in the channel.

Welcome to The Buzz from ChannelBuzz.ca, I’m Robert Dutt, today is Thursday, April 23, 2026, and here’s what’s happening in the channel today.

Hewlett Packard Enterprise is doubling its dedicated sales team to drive its Hybrid CloudOps software portfolio through the channel. According to Rocco Lavista, vice president and general manager of worldwide Hybrid CloudOps software sales at HPE, the vendor is actively working to accelerate partner attach rates for its software suite. Lavista recently noted that rising global memory prices and the resulting hardware cost pressures are actively driving demand for virtualization alternatives like VM Essentials. For Canadian MSPs and VARs grappling with supply chain volatility and tightening server margins, the vendor’s expanded software push offers a potential pivot point to maintain profitability through higher-margin recurring revenue streams.

AvePoint and Omdia have released new global research indicating that governance and compliance, rather than technical capability, represent the primary barrier to AI monetization for managed service providers. Based on a survey of over three hundred MSPs, fifty-one percent cited governance as the main obstacle to customer AI adoption. The report highlights a significant execution gap: while ninety-four percent of respondents are committed to AI readiness, only forty-three percent report high maturity in their actual service delivery. As Canadian solution providers face increasing data sovereignty and privacy requirements, the research suggests that packaging AI governance as a distinct, standalone service may be the most viable path to capturing a share of a market Omdia projects will reach two hundred and seventy-six billion dollars by 2030.

Security vendor ESET has published its 2026 SMB Cyber Readiness Index, highlighting the growing influence of cyber insurance underwriters on the managed services landscape. The report found that seventy-eight percent of Canadian small and medium-sized businesses now carry cyber insurance, with underwriters increasingly mandating specific security controls as a condition of coverage. Among Canadian SMBs that outsource their security, twenty-seven percent are now bypassing traditional providers to use a cyber insurer offering Managed Detection and Response services, while thirty-eight percent remain with a traditional MSP. For the Canadian channel, the data underscores a critical shift: insurers are actively setting the security baseline, and MSPs must integrate advanced monitoring capabilities to prevent clients from migrating to insurer-provided solutions.

Later today on In The Channel, my conversation with Eric Arcese, vice president of global partner marketing at Dell Technologies, discussing the AI Factory, VxRail’s evolution, and what’s ahead.

And if you haven’t heard it yet, be sure to check out yesterday’s chat with Rewst founder Aharon Chernin on building the automated MSP.

That’s how we’re seeing the headlines today. I’m Robert Dutt for ChannelBuzz.ca, thanks for listening.

Robert Dutt: Hello and welcome to In The Channel from ChannelBuzz.ca, bringing news and information to the Canadian IT channel community for the last sixteen years. I’m Robert Dutt, editor of ChannelBuzz.ca, and your host for the show.

If you’ve been following the conversation around AI and MSPs over the last year or two, you’ve probably noticed that a lot of it is pretty fuzzy. AI is going to transform your business. AI is the future of service delivery. AI this, AI that – but not a lot of specificity about what it actually means for the way an MSP runs its operations day to day.

My guest today has been building technology specifically for MSPs for more than twenty-five years. He founded Perch Security, which was acquired by ConnectWise back in 2020, and then turned around and founded Rewst, a workflow automation platform built from the ground up for managed service providers. Rewst now has over 1,500 MSPs on the platform, which means he has a pretty clear view of where the channel actually stands on automation – not where vendors wish it stood, but where it actually is.

We talk about the difference between an MSP that does automation and an automated MSP, and why that distinction matters more than any specific tool. We get into why AI and automation are not the same thing, and why confusing them leads MSPs to make bad decisions. And we look at what the operational stack of an MSP actually starts to look like as AI moves from advising on workflows to generating and executing them.

Aharon Chernin is the founder and CEO of Rewst, and he’s been thinking about this a lot longer than most.

Let’s get right into it. My chat with Aharon Chernin.

Aharon, thanks for taking the time. I appreciate it.

Aharon Chernin: Nice being here.

Robert Dutt: Rewst isn’t your first time building specifically for the MSP market. You come out of Perch Security, acquired by ConnectWise. What did your time inside ConnectWise’s world teach you, and was Rewst a direct response to something specific you saw from there, or from the community there?

Aharon Chernin: I was actually only at ConnectWise a couple of months. Really, the Rewst idea came from working with MSPs for years while I was doing Perch. I was learning more and more about how MSPs operated. I saw the tools they were using, the problems they were having. And, mind you, this is the era circa 2017-18, and they’re using tools called PSAs – professional services automation – that didn’t really automate anything. It had me scratching my head: what’s going on here? But then I just continued moving forward because I had security stuff going on.

And then there were RMM tools called Automate, and I was trying to figure out what these things actually automated. It was just endpoint stuff, right? But there’s so much more than just an endpoint. And then I saw a bunch of single-point solutions – software products out there doing a single automation, not even calling it an automation, just calling it a software product. So once I had the opportunity after Perch, I went and started investigating what were these quirks in the market I was seeing, because automation is much, much bigger than what the market actually thought it was.

Robert Dutt: Well, and it’s for so long been one of the key premises of managed services – the idea of automate everything you can towards success. So it’s interesting to hear those observations. You’ve got the platform now with 1,500 or more MSPs on it – you probably have a better view of the real state of automation adoption in the channel than almost anyone out there. How would you honestly characterize it today? Is this a story of meaningful progress from the scenario you saw back in your Perch days, or is it still pretty early for many MSPs?

Aharon Chernin: It’s still the beginning. We only have 1,500 MSPs. And how many MSPs are there – depending on who you talk to, 60, 80,000. We only have 1,500 of them. So in my mind, these are all early adopters in automation.

But when it comes to what adoption actually looks like in an MSP that successfully automates, it’s cultural – 100%. If you look at cybersecurity – Perch was a cybersecurity company – you’d be looking for the correct size MSP that focused on security to resell through. But when it comes to automation, every size MSP needs to automate – small and big. And we’re actually seeing that. We see really, really small MSPs automate and really, really big MSPs automate. And we’ve also seen both those sizes fail.

The number one reason they succeed is culture. The buyer – the buyer could be the CEO of the MSP, or a director of managed services, whoever can write a cheque – that person has to want to automate. And the engineer who’s actually going to do the automation, they have to want to do it too. If the buyer wants to automate but the engineer doesn’t, it’s not going to work. If the engineer wants to automate but the buyer doesn’t, it’s not going to work.

And that cultural thing extends further than just the want. The CEO of the MSP should be running around saying, “I want to be an automated MSP,” and excited about it. If they’re not excited about it, they’re going to be a part-time automation MSP. The way I like to say it is: you’re either an automated MSP, or you’re an MSP that does automation.

Robert Dutt: What do you find helps flip the switch from one to the other? What is it that gets those teams that are either misaligned or not aligned at all to get things lined up and moving in the right direction?

Aharon Chernin: It’s really an open line of communication between the buyer and the person implementing. Because if the buyer has an automation idea – just one, a single simple basic thing that would save the company time or help improve service delivery reliability – and that engineer performs that small automation, and they talk to each other, and the engineer says, “Yes, it’s running. Yes, it runs fifty times a day. We’ve saved eight hours today running this automation” – and that actually gets back to the person who writes the cheque – there is alignment. The tide has turned. Suddenly the MSP says, “How do I dedicate more people to helping automate this business?” It’s a matter of getting that first win and getting it in place.

Robert Dutt: There’s a lot of talk, obviously, about AI. And Canadian MSPs are being sold a lot of things that blur the line between AI and automation. You’ve talked about that distinction – the idea that AI thinks and automation acts. Can you expand on that? Because I think getting that framing right can help change how MSPs make decisions and think about how they’re structuring things internally.

Aharon Chernin: AI can’t touch anything by itself. This goes back to: AI thinks, automation does. Take ChatGPT, for example. ChatGPT is not an AI. ChatGPT is a tool on top of AI. The AI is GPT. The tool is Chat. So just having AI gives you a lot of answers to a lot of questions, but nothing gets done. You need the tool on top of the AI. I can’t think of an easier way to define it than that. There are an infinite number of possibilities of what you can do with a tool that leverages AI.

Robert Dutt: So you guys have RoboRewsty now. You’re moving from AI that guides building workflows to AI that generates those workflows. That sounds incremental, but to your point on thinking versus doing, I suspect it’s more significant than that. What actually changes for an MSP team when anyone in the org can describe a workflow in language that’s natural to them and have it built for them, rather than having to go back to that one person who knows how to build out the automation?

Aharon Chernin: AI is easier to understand than even that. We need to think of it as just another employee. Now, depending on how much the business trusts that employee is how much governance we’re going to put around that employee. If there is one hundred percent trust, it gets free will and can run freely. If there is zero to ten percent trust, every step of the way needs to be gated by a person.

But there’s a balance. One of the funny things about cybersecurity is everyone looks at the cyber risk side of the equation, but no one looks at the business risk. The business risk of having zero trust in your AI means all the other MSPs can surpass you. You need to balance business risk and cyber risk. It’s never one hundred percent cyber risk, or your business won’t move forward.

How do you put people in the middle? When you tell the AI to build the automation, you require approval gates along the way. And the AI will build in those approval gates for people to get in the way of automation and approve or deny things. That solves the problem of the AI acting fully independently.

Robert Dutt: You’ve announced an MCP server that lets external AI agents trigger Rewst automations directly. That feels like a pretty big architectural shift toward that AI-doing side of things – toward operations that are genuinely agent-driven rather than just automated. What does that look like in practice today, and where do you see that going over the next couple of years?

Aharon Chernin: I see three main agent use cases. But if we sit back and think, “Where does this MCP server fit in?” – in my world, in my vision, when I create products, I have to try to predict the future. Because it takes time. If I create a product for what’s needed right now, by the time it gets done and goes to market, it’s already a bad idea.

In the future, people will be interacting with agents, not with the user interface of any product – a PSA, an RMM, maybe even an operating system. When you think that way, without a capable MCP server in front of your product, you’re forcing people to always log into it. If everyone is in Claude Code all day long and you’re the one product they have to pop out of Claude Code for, that’s not good. I don’t want to be there.

And for folks who want more approval controls in an automation process – what’s cool about using Claude Code to interact with the Rewst platform is you can put requirements in your Claude Code, in your AGENTS.md file, for example, to be enforced however you want them enforced on your side. Which is pretty neat, in my opinion.

As far as the three major use cases for agents: I immediately get brain-fried when someone asks what an agent-driven MSP of the future looks like, because I think – what agent are they talking about? I really see three specific, distinct agent implementations that an MSP could ever have.

One is an agent that they build for their customers that just does customer-centric business things. That’s not something the MSP would run internally – that’s something they want their customer running. Then they may want an agent that the customer uses to interact with the MSP – “Hey, I need to add a new user,” for example. That may launch Rewst automations, because it’s just an agent – it’s just AI, it can’t go do those things on its own. And then the third type is the agent that an engineer uses at the MSP itself, because that agent is going to have more privileged access and communicate in a much more technical way than you’d want to present to a client.

Robert Dutt: How do you see those rolling out in terms of timeline? My first assumption would be that you build the internal side first – get the side the engineers are working with up and running, learn from that, then start building out the customer-facing side, and finally toward the end-user type stuff.

Aharon Chernin: You always eat your own dog food first. It’s got to be useful for you. If you’re just doing it to say you’re doing it, you won’t be able to sustain it. It won’t scale.

I would have your help desk and your engineers doing simple things first. I love the owner-operators that have grand visions of their AI-automated futures, because those are the ones who are going to succeed. The one downfall they may have is they won’t settle for anything other than that grand vision – they work on the most complex thing first. Or they get a ton of small wins under their belt and never go for the big win because the big vision feels too far away.

So: keep it small initially. Eat your own dog food. Get really good at it. Then move bigger successfully internally. Then maybe the next step is the agent the customer uses to interact with your business – do the same thing, start small, then go big. The agent the MSP builds for their customers’ businesses is the toughest. Not because it’s technically challenging – it’s tough because the MSP has to go learn how that customer’s business actually operates. And if you want your agent to provide value, you’re going to have to do that work.

Robert Dutt: That’s a chance to really test the “trusted advisor” theory out and get real about it.

Aharon Chernin: Exactly.

Robert Dutt: Let’s talk about the economics of this. Especially as a Canadian MSP – we’ve got a smaller talent pool, cross-border salary competition, the Canadian dollar. The headcount argument for automation is particularly acute here. Where does break-even actually land? What does an MSP need to have in place before this really starts to visibly move the margin needle?

Aharon Chernin: You start with understanding the economics of automation. The most basic is: how much time will you save? And even the definition of saving time can be less obvious than you’d think, because saving time might mean “I don’t do this work today” – so how do you calculate that? Well, one of those savings is: will it reduce churn? How much time does it take to go get a new client? Then you realize, oh, there is a time savings there. Or it may not save time, but it improves service delivery reliability. How much time do you spend each month on ticket re-dos because they were done wrong the first time? And some of these savings are security-related. If you can take away privileged access from your lowest-level help desk because automation handles those tasks instead, how much does an incident cost you each month?

The next big thing is understanding the cost to build an automation. We’ve dramatically reduced that over the past three months through RoboRewsty – you just describe an automation and it goes and builds it for you, then runs, tests, and fixes it. It could save you roughly ninety percent of the build time. Just like writing code with Claude Code saves you a lot of time building software.

So: you’ve got an automation idea. It costs you four hours to build and saves you 400 hours a month – you break even really, really quickly. You have an automation that takes four hours to build but only saves you thirty minutes a month – do you still build it? Yes. Because automation is not a one-month profit thing. It builds off itself each and every month. And that’s when you start to realize: maybe I do start small, because the big grandiose ideas might save you ten hours a month but take you a hundred hours to build.

We’ve got a couple of Canadian partners who’ve had great success and are okay with me naming them. Resolved IT: last month they did 420,000 tasks and saved fifty-nine hours – 1,800 endpoints. Ideological Systems: 28,000 tasks, forty-five hours saved – 750 endpoints. And Yardstick: 744,000 tasks, 327 hours saved – 6,500 endpoints. Just some numbers for you.

Robert Dutt: That’s certainly some solid data. You’ve talked about where you’re at now with RoboRewsty. Can you share a little about where you see things going in the short term – in terms of the direction of the technology and how you’re automating processes?

Aharon Chernin: I feel like I’m more of a future predictor than a startup founder. AI is both scary and exciting at the same time. It’s a huge opportunity for everybody – for MSPs, for vendors that serve MSPs. But it’s also super scary because it’s a disruptor. It could disrupt MSPs, the vendors that serve them, and their customers’ businesses. You have to take risks in how you predict what’s coming.

But I really do think the user interface for people is going away, and that the primary user of all products will be AI. That’s where the world is going. Think about that – how does that change how an MSP operates? Look at the tool stack MSPs use today. Is your PSA built for people, or is it built for AI? It’s going to be interesting. Never a dull moment in this industry.

Robert Dutt: Last one for me. If I’m an MSP listening to this and being honest with myself about where I’m at in my automation and AI journey – what’s the one thing that most of them should be doing in the next six months that most of them aren’t?

Aharon Chernin: Starting at a really high level: you’re a business owner. I’m a business owner. I understand how hard it is to get out of firefighting mode. It’s hard to see thirty days out. There’s so much going on – happy people that want to talk to you, unhappy people pulling you aside. You have to spend some time thinking beyond thirty days. You can’t ignore what’s coming with AI and automation, because there is going to be an MSP that doesn’t ignore it.

The next level: come up with an automation idea. As the owner of the MSP, that’s the most valuable automation idea that will ever get identified, because it’s coming straight from the business – not from a random engineer with a random problem. That engineer can go automate something and make their job better, but you may never know about it and it may never impact the business. Come up with an automation idea. If you find that easy, come up with more. Having the ideas is half the battle – not even having a product. Just start writing them down.

Next: identify someone in your organization who will become the automation champion. As fast as tech is moving, it may not have to be a super technical person, because they’ll be able to talk to an agent to make the automation happen. But if it were me, I would still pick who I think can automate the best. Go to your team and say, “Who wants to automate?” and pick the hand-raiser. That’ll also help with alignment.

Once all that’s done, you’re finally ready to look at automation solutions. Learn everything you can – we have Cluck U, our certification program, get certified in automation. Then build that simple automation as quickly as possible and get it into production. Do not wait for perfection. If you’ve got a ten-step process that takes a hundred minutes, and you only automate nine steps, you’re still saving ninety minutes. Why wait for the last step to get that win?

And then we’ve got a conference called Flow – an automation-focused conference for MSPs. The coolest thing about it is that everyone there is an MSP that wants to become an automated MSP, not just one that wants to do some automation. This is our third year. First year we had about 120 people, second year over 300, and this year I think we’ll have 500. It’s in Nashville, June 23rd. Check it out at mspflow.events. Was I allowed to plug that?

Robert Dutt: I think you’re good.

Aharon Chernin: Sounds good.

Robert Dutt: Aharon, I appreciate you taking the time and giving us a view of where automation’s at and where it could be going. Thank you.

Aharon Chernin: Thanks – it was nice chatting.

Robert Dutt: There you have it – Aharon Chernin from Rewst. I’d like to thank Aharon for his time today, and thank you for listening.

A couple of things I’m still thinking about from this conversation. The framing that stuck with me most is the distinction between an MSP that does automation and an automated MSP. It sounds like a subtle difference, but Aharon’s point is that one is a project and the other is a culture – and only one of them actually compounds over time. If automation is something your team does when they get around to it, rather than something that’s baked into how the business operates, you’re probably not going to get the return you think you are.

The other thing worth sitting with is the governance question. As AI moves from helping you build workflows to actually generating and running them, the trust model has to evolve with it. The new employee analogy Aharon used – starting with limited access, expanding trust as it earns it – is a practical framework for MSPs who are trying to figure out how much autonomy to give AI in their stack right now.

And for any Canadian MSPs listening – the data points Aharon shared from Resolved IT, from Yardstick, from Ideological Systems – those are real Canadian shops with real numbers. The economics of automation are compelling anywhere, but they’re particularly compelling here, given our labour market realities.

If this episode was useful to you, the best thing you can do is subscribe to or follow the ChannelBuzz.ca podcast wherever you get your podcasts. We’re on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, and most major directories. A rating or review goes a long way and is always appreciated.

Until next time, I’m Robert Dutt for ChannelBuzz.ca, and I’ll see you in the channel.

Welcome to The Buzz from ChannelBuzz.ca, I’m Robert Dutt, today is Wednesday, April 22, 2026, and here’s what’s happening in the channel today.

Salesforce has launched a new Forward Deployed Engineering Partner Network for Agentforce, backing the initiative with a 50 million dollar investment in agent-building incentives. According to Nick Johnston, senior vice president of partner sales, the software vendor is committing to provide channel partners with the same training, tools, and direct product team access that its internal staff receives. The program is designed to help partners build their own agentic AI practices and push beyond basic implementation. For Canadian MSPs and consulting partners, the initiative signals a continued shift away from selling software seats toward delivering measurable business outcomes. As AI deployments become more complex, partners who can demonstrate real-world results will be positioned to capture higher-margin advisory and managed services revenue.

Cisco has officially reinstated its compute deal registration differential, reversing a controversial decision made in late February. The networking giant had originally eliminated the discount in response to rising memory prices and supply chain volatility. According to partners, that move effectively erased roughly eight points of margin on server deals, causing friction and prompting some to look at competing infrastructure vendors. In a recent communication, Cisco senior vice president of global partner sales Tim Coogan confirmed the discount restoration for registered compute hardware deals, though the tightened seven-day quote protection window remains in place. For Canadian IT solution providers, the reversal is a necessary correction that restores critical margin predictability, allowing partners to confidently quote hardware projects in an unpredictable supply chain environment.

A new security platform built by former Pax8 leaders and an experienced MSP owner is making its official debut this week at the Kaseya event. CloudCapsule, led by CEO Nick Ross, is launching its Manage module, which is designed to help managed service providers assess, remediate, and demonstrate security outcomes within a single workflow. The solution extends Microsoft 365 security management into a unified system, addressing the ongoing problem of fragmented tools and manual reporting. For Canadian MSPs, operational consolidation is becoming increasingly essential. Proving the value of security services to clients is a persistent challenge, and a platform that automates the reporting process can help reduce administrative overhead while providing tangible proof of security posture improvements to justify recurring revenue.

Later today on In The Channel, we have a conversation with Rewst founder Aharon Chernin. We will be talking about building the automated MSP, and how AI thinks while automation acts. It is a deep dive into where the service delivery model is headed.

And if you haven’t heard it yet, make sure you check out yesterday’s episode featuring Jennifer Roy, CEO of Nucleus Networks. We had a great discussion on maintaining culture while scaling a national presence, and what private equity really looks like from inside a Canadian MSP.

That’s how we’re seeing the headlines today. I’m Robert Dutt for ChannelBuzz.ca, thanks for listening.

Robert Dutt: Hello and welcome to In the Channel from ChannelBuzz.ca, bringing news and information to the Canadian IT channel community for the last 16 years. I’m Robert Dutt, editor of ChannelBuzz.ca and your host for the show.

My guest today is Jennifer Roy, CEO of Nucleus Networks, a managed service provider based in Vancouver that now operates across five Canadian cities. Nucleus was recently named to the CRN MSP 500 Pioneer 250 list, and Jennifer herself was named CEO of the Year by The Channel Company in 2024.

What I find really interesting about Jennifer’s story is that she didn’t come up through IT. She had no technical background when she took her first MSP job about 15 years ago. She worked her way from service manager to COO to CEO, and along the way built her reputation for people-first leadership and culture building in an industry that doesn’t always prioritize those things.

We’re going to talk about what it actually looks like to scale a Canadian MSP nationally, how she thinks about hiring and culture when one wrong person can undo years of work, what it’s like operating inside a PE-backed platform like Lyra Technology Group while keeping your own identity, and where she sees AI fitting into the MSP business model right now.

Let’s get right into it. My chat with Jennifer Roy.

Robert Dutt: Jennifer, thanks for taking the time. I appreciate it.

Jennifer Roy: Thank you so much for having me.

Robert Dutt: You’ve talked openly about the fact that when you got your first job in the MSP world, you didn’t know what most of the acronyms in the job description meant — and that’s something I can relate to. I don’t know if you remember or know Nick Tidd, who led 3Com Canada and has gone through a variety of channel roles. But when I was a young reporter, he took me aside and said, “The thing you have to watch for in this industry is the TLAs.” I didn’t bite on that, and it was a great joke at the time.

But anyway, the point being — you didn’t come in as a technician. What made you apply anyway? What do you think being a non-technical leader brings to an MSP that someone who has that technical background might not?

Jennifer Roy: Great question. When I started in this industry — and I’m going to age myself here — close to 15 years ago, I was working in a quasi-government job and I had gone on maternity leave. I had come back from having my daughter and realized that I was underutilized and really bored. It just wasn’t a fast enough pace for me to feel fulfilled every day.

So I had gone to my manager, who was also a good friend of mine, and said to her, “I think it’s time. I’m going to start looking, and I want you to know — I want to be really upfront and clear — that you’re going to lose me likely sooner than later because I’m going to start looking for a new role.” She was so incredibly supportive and said to me, “I’ve got this tech company that’s looking for a service manager. They’re looking for someone to come in and help with their operations. Is it maybe something you want to explore?”

I said, “Well, send me the job description and I’ll take a look.” I looked at the job description and I didn’t know any of the acronyms. I didn’t know what ITIL was. I didn’t know what a SAN was. I didn’t know VPN. I didn’t know any of these things. I said to her, “I’m vastly underqualified for this position.”

She said, “I know the consultant that’s helping them hire — I think you should at least have a conversation.” I thought, “Okay, what’s the worst that’s going to happen? I apply for this job and don’t get it?” So I applied, and it happened to be the legend Chris Jay’s MSP. They interviewed me — I met with Todd Kane and Chris Jay throughout the process, had a couple of interviews. Really, what they were looking for was somebody who wasn’t going to think from a technical perspective, but look at things from a client perspective and a coaching and leadership perspective — which were tools I had.

So I took a leap of faith, and they also took a leap of faith and hired me to run their service desk. I think it was a very unique experience, something I didn’t think I was capable of doing. But I’ve always been a big believer that growth happens when you’re uncomfortable. So I made myself really uncomfortable taking a position I was massively underqualified for — and then 15 years later, this is where I’m at.

The piece that I think I offer that’s different than technical leaders is I always look at things from that client perspective. My CTO is really great at finding unique technical solutions. But my first question is always: how does that impact our people? Not just our clients, but our team. Is it going to be a positive benefit for them? So I think that’s what I bring that’s different.

Robert Dutt: You joined Nucleus as COO in late 2021 and took over as CEO from Martin DesRosiers in 2024. He’d been in the chair for a decade and built a lot of what Nucleus is. What was it like stepping into that? What did you want to keep, and where did it feel like you needed to put your own stamp on things?

Jennifer Roy: Big shoes to fill for sure. I was hired in late 2021 as Chief Operating Officer — operations has been my background forever, so it was a really comfortable position to come in and kind of become Martin’s right hand. I looked at all of Nucleus’s operations. Nucleus had done an incredible job of building their brand and their business, but coming in with a fresh perspective, I was able to optimize a lot of their KPIs and processes and procedures. I had a lot of fun restructuring operations when I first joined.

In January of 2024, when Martin asked me to take over as CEO as he elevated up to our parent company, I was definitely nervous. One, I had never been a CEO before. Two, I was stepping into these huge shoes. And then also — the elephant in the room — I’m a woman CEO of an MSP and there’s not a lot of us. So I was also mindful of the fact that I had to live up to that standard as well.

Some of the things Martin had done for the last decade I kept, because don’t change what’s not broken. But I also wanted to put my stamp on things. I used that opportunity to make changes that we probably should have made but had stayed comfortable on. I’ll use a really simple example: we were a Microsoft shop, but we used Slack as our main messaging platform. I said, “Why do we have two? This doesn’t make sense.” Everyone was really comfortable with Slack and loved it, but it was a good way for me to say, “With new leadership comes new changes. We’re a Microsoft shop — we need to eat our own dog food. We’re getting rid of Slack.”

So I made some small changes, and that really wasn’t just to put my own stamp on things — the timing just made sense. New leadership, some changes we probably should have done a long time ago. I also did a reorg and changed the reporting structure, moved some leaders into different roles I thought they were better suited for. I moved our Director of Client Success into a VP of Operations role because I didn’t backfill my COO position — I just elevated him and put him into a role he can now grow into.

Robert Dutt: Let’s talk expansion. Nucleus started in Vancouver and now has offices in Victoria, Prince George, Calgary, and Toronto. For MSP owners listening who are thinking about expanding beyond their home market — what did you learn about scaling a company across cities, and what broke along the way that you had to fix?

Jennifer Roy: Scaling across cities is challenging. Anyone who has done it with ease, I would love to learn from. It is hard to get penetration in a market you are not currently in. Building that brand awareness and reputation is difficult unless you have an anchor client that’s really helping you with referrals.

Finding talent in a new city, building brand awareness in a new city, getting new logos — a lot of what MSPs sell comes down to trust. You’re asking someone to buy recurring services. This is not a one-time transaction. It’s a recurring relationship, which means you really have to have that trust. It’s harder when you’re an unknown presence. In Vancouver, we have a ton of legal clients. I can sign legal clients much easier here because I can name-drop those other clients. When we move into a new market, I don’t have that big group of logos to point to.

The biggest lesson I’ve learned is that you need to be prepared to make an investment when you go into a new market. You need to be prepared that you’re not going to sign new clients before you hire staff and before you get marketing spend going in that area. You really have to be prepared to take a loss before you start to see the rewards. If you haven’t budgeted to lose money to expand, then you’re probably not prepared to do it.

Robert Dutt: You touch on the legal vertical, and you’ve built real depth in a number of verticals — in architecture, in construction, in legal, and in very Canadian style, in mining. How deliberate was the choice to specialize, and how does vertical focus change the way that you hire, sell, and ultimately deliver those recurring services?

Jennifer Roy: We started in architecture, engineering, and construction. Nucleus’s founder was an engineer by trade who was really handy with computers and ended up branching and developing Nucleus from that. So AEC is where we started. For a long time, the majority of our clients were in that vertical. Then we started to layer in nonprofits and expanded from there — so now, as you mentioned, mining, legal, nonprofits, and AEC are our biggest verticals. Although if you ask me, “Do you have a client in hospitality?” Yes. “Manufacturing?” Yes. We’re really vertical-agnostic, but we hire sometimes based on skill set for a specific vertical.

If you’re hiring someone for an architecture and engineering firm, someone who knows AutoCAD is probably going to be helpful. Or if you’re hiring in our legal pod — because we do everything through pods, so we have a pod that supports most of our legal clients — knowing PC Law or Easy Law and being able to troubleshoot errors with those line-of-business applications is going to be super helpful.

One of my account executives has a background working in marketing at law firms and is well connected in that space. He is my go-to to sell agreements at law firms because he understands lawyers, he understands their assistants, he understands what’s important. He understands why if you can’t print a document, that’s a crisis at a law firm in a way that it might not be at a marketing agency. So we try to hire looking at where those skills will come in handy for the verticals we mostly support.

Robert Dutt: You’ve said that people-first leadership isn’t just a slogan — not just a poster on the wall — it’s a daily operating philosophy. And I think that makes sense given the operational lens you come from. You’ve also been pretty candid about being a Type A personality who’s had to learn to delegate and trust as you move through the ranks. For MSP owners who hear “culture” and think it sounds soft — what does people-first actually look like operationally at Nucleus, and what changed in the business when you leaned into it?

Jennifer Roy: People-first to me really means that you make decisions that are going to be the most impactful for your team. Because if you take care of your people, they take care of you, and they take care of your clients. So things like investing in training and development, having better-than-average benefits, better-than-average vacation, better-than-average pay — those are the things that keep people, and you protect your culture like nothing else.

I hire by our core values. I fire by our core values. I am so particular about who we let join the team. A warm body is not good enough. I would rather have a vacancy for six months than hire the wrong person, because one toxic person can ruin everything you’ve built.

We’re a remote-first company. The majority of our people work remotely — that makes it a challenge to build camaraderie. You don’t get those water cooler conversations, so you have to be very intentional. We have huddles with each team a couple of times a week, and I make a point of joining those huddles even as CEO, just to say hello and get face time. I have an open door policy — anyone can Teams me, text me, call me with anything they want. We do fireside chats where people can sign up and ask anything, an ask-me-anything format that rotates through our executive team. No questions are off limits.

Quarterly, we do a town hall. I have a slide I call “the good, the bad, and the ugly” and I am super transparent: what went well, what didn’t go well that quarter, and what is the ugly. Even if the ugly is something I’m responsible for and I made a mistake, I hold myself accountable to the whole company and say, “I did you guys wrong. I made this decision, here’s the impact it had, here’s what I learned, and here’s what I’m going to take away from it.”

I’m really proud that employee one and employee two from Nucleus are still here today, over 20 years later. That’s really unheard of in the MSP space. Our average tenure is close to four years — from what I’ve seen, the average at other MSPs I’ve worked from was about two years. So we’re almost double. I think a big piece of that comes down to providing a culture and a place where people feel safe — that psychological safety to challenge, to say “I don’t agree with this” or “this process didn’t roll out smoothly for me and here’s why.” That psychological safety is what builds the culture piece, where people feel invested and feel like they’re part of the bigger picture.

It is not just a slogan on the wall. I read every single comment on our ENPS verbatim — I don’t have HR summarize it for me. I read every comment. I want to know exactly what we need to do as an organization to provide a better home for our people.

Robert Dutt: Nucleus is part of the Lyra Technology Group family now — 75-plus MSPs under that umbrella. A lot of MSP owners are either being approached by PE-backed platforms, watching peers who’ve gone that route, or thinking about it themselves. What does that relationship actually look like from the inside? What do you get from being part of the group that you wouldn’t have on your own — and conversely, what did you have to give up?

Jennifer Roy: Great question. And your count is actually a little lower than what it is — the last I heard was 111 MSPs. Globally, I’m told we are the largest MSP in the world with all 111 MSPs under the Lyra umbrella.

I’ll be super honest: when Evergreen purchased Nucleus, it was before I had started. They purchased in July of 2021, I joined in December of 2021. I will admit I was ignorant and did not know about the acquisition. I had known of Nucleus in the marketplace before and did not know they had been purchased by Evergreen. So it was during my first week of onboarding that I found out about Evergreen and Lyra and went, “Oh — what did I get myself into?” Thinking: private equity, this is going to be a lot of red tape, this is going to be really difficult.

I was reassured: no, it’s decentralized, we operate as we always have. And one of the best examples I give of that decentralization model is how I was hired. I had exited my last MSP and was looking for a new home. Todd Kane — who’s been a mentor of mine and gave me my first role at Fully Managed — put on LinkedIn that he knew an operations leader who was looking for a new home. He lined up a whole bunch of interviews for me. This was just a few days after I was unemployed. I had all these job offers, and then Nucleus came to the table. I said, “Listen, it’s Friday morning and I’ve told everyone I’ll give them an answer by Friday at five o’clock. You have six hours if you want me.”

Martin worked double time, had conversations with me and the rest of the executive team, and got me an offer in six hours. They had not budgeted for a COO. They had not posted for a COO. It was not a role they were actively looking to fill — but Martin knew there was talent there and he wanted to hire it. He didn’t need to go to Evergreen or Lyra and say, “Can I get approval to hire this executive team member?” He was able to just say, “I’ll figure out my budget. It’s my budget. I’m going to hire her.” That to me is the biggest story of decentralization — the fact that you can move that fast and there isn’t a lot of red tape.

In addition to that, we’ve got 111 operating companies, which means my geographical reach is incredible. I have a client with an office in Australia — I can pick up the phone and call one of my partners in Australia and say, “Can you do boots on the ground for me?” No problem. And they’ll likewise send their work in Canada to me. So we’ve got this vast network of trusted people, whereas otherwise you’re googling someone and hoping they’ll represent your company well.

And I’ve got a built-in peer group. We recently implemented Thread and were having some issues with it. We were able to call a sister company in the US and say, “I know you’re highly successful with Thread — can you help us with this?” And they said, “Here’s our code.” Most MSPs are not that transparent — “here’s our secret sauce, you can have it.” So it’s been really incredible from a professional development standpoint, and just having those relationships to leverage.

The team at Lyra genuinely cares about the operating companies. I feel like I’ve got additional support, but not a high level of involvement where they’re stepping on my toes. I’ve just got an arm of support if I need it.

Robert Dutt: And I have to imagine — to your point on the Thread issue — with a hundred-plus organizations of people all sitting in the same seat as you, if you go and say, “Hey, I’m seeing X, anyone else seen this?” — odds are pretty good someone’s going to put their hand up.

Jennifer Roy: A hundred percent. And it goes the other way too — there are sometimes opportunities. I recently had an RFP that needed Linux support, and we’re not a big Linux shop. I went into my peer group and said, “Does anyone have a Linux expert who can help me bid on this? It’s only two servers — I can support everything else.” I had a handful of people say, “Yes, no problem.” It really creates more opportunity for our business than we would have without it.

Robert Dutt: You were just on a panel at the Pax8 sales kickoff talking about AI-driven services. You told CRN that your investments this year are focused on AI-enabled automation and better data integration. Where are you actually deploying AI at Nucleus right now, and how do you think about that as a business opportunity versus a change to the billable-hour model?

Jennifer Roy: There are a lot of AI initiatives happening at Nucleus. We’re looking at our internal processes and how we can automate and create smart AI for our current workflows.

A perfect example: I have a monthly report I send up to Lyra covering how things are going in each department — initiatives, financial results. I used to ask every department to send me a summary, then I’d take all those summaries, combine them into one, and send it. It was really time-consuming, and I’d often kick things back to leaders and say, “I need more data, more context, this isn’t written clearly enough.” So I’d give coaching, wait for a revision, and go back and forth.

Our CTO built a simple smart form so that if a department head didn’t provide enough data in their response, it would say, “You do not have data in this. You need data. Jen will send this back to you.” The coaching was already baked into the form. And then it would consolidate all of their writing to sound like me — he built it by taking my old documents and putting them into AI and saying, “Make it sound like Jen.” It combines all the data, and then I go in and edit and clean it up, versus having to do it all from scratch. It probably saves six hours a month of my time.

For our clients, we’re looking at their workflows and starting really small — but we’re starting. We’re taking our noisiest clients, the ones who generate the most support tickets, and using them as guinea pigs to create AI and automation to reduce our support hours. I’m not necessarily billing them a ton of money for it yet — I’m really focused on what we can learn from their environment so we can make it more marketable and repeatable.

I’m also working on a big initiative to provide a tool called Synthrio to all of our clients as part of an opt-out campaign — so looking at how we can help our clients use AI in a safe, controlled way. We know shadow AI is happening everywhere. So how do we make it so that we can provide it in a controlled environment where our clients aren’t losing their IP? That should be going live in the next couple of weeks.

Robert Dutt: I love that example of automating what you can for those noisier customers. It looks like value add for them as a client, and it’s also value add for you as an MSP — because your effective billing rate goes up.

Jennifer Roy: Totally. And at the same time, I’m getting my technicians and engineers trained on how to create workflows. Without those real-life examples, we’re kind of flying blind.

Robert Dutt: You’re plugged into the North American MSP community pretty deeply at this point — between Lyra’s peer network and various organizational communities. When you compare notes with your American peers, what feels different about running an MSP in Canada? Is the Canadian market catching up, leading, or playing a different game entirely?

Jennifer Roy: Interesting question. I don’t know that there are a lot of differences, honestly. There are differences depending on geographic region — I have a peer in New York City and their hourly rate is basically double mine. Vancouver is an expensive city, but New York is more so. So there are differences in what you can charge per user or per hour. But I don’t actually think there is a ton of difference in how we operate.

There are economic challenges in Canada that are different from the US at different times, but they’re all very similar. I think we all operate very similarly. The biggest piece I would say is you have to be a little more mindful of Canadian data residency. Our clients want their data in Canada, so there are certain partnerships I’ve had to exclude because they weren’t willing to guarantee Canadian data residency. I can’t take on a new partner if they can’t host our data in Canada. Those are some small differences — but really, I always say: we’re delivering customer service. We’re just doing it through technology. I don’t think where you are matters that much.

Robert Dutt: How do you see that data residency and increasingly data sovereignty conversation evolving with your customers?

Jennifer Roy: It’s definitely evolved over the years, and I think it’s become more important — especially around certain verticals that want to ensure their data is protected and kept in Canada. We work with some investment firms and companies with personal identification data that they absolutely do not want released anywhere. So we really need to look at each client specifically: what is the requirement for their vertical, and how do we ensure their data is safe?

We are a SOC 2 Type 2 organization, so we take security and governance measures very seriously and ensure we’re following those to a T. And I won’t sign a deal if a client comes to us with requirements that I don’t know how we’d fulfill. I’ll walk away from the opportunity — the last thing I want to do is fail a client.

Robert Dutt: My last question. You guys hit 25 next year at Nucleus. Where does Nucleus go from here? What does the next chapter look like?

Jennifer Roy: I want to see us double our growth in the next five years — new logos, revenue, team members. Even with the introduction of AI and automation, I don’t want to see our team size shrink. I want to see us be able to work on different and more creative things.

I’d love to see us be fully across Canada, not just in the three provinces we’re currently in. That’s a very lofty goal — that’s my BHAG — but that’s where I’d like to see us in five years. Just growth, growth, growth, and brand awareness. I think Nucleus is a well-known brand, especially across Canada, but I’d love to see it even more so.

Robert Dutt: Well, good luck on attaining all those goals. And thinking back to something you said in answer to the first question — about feeling like things weren’t changing fast enough in the role you were in before you took that first MSP job — I don’t think that’s a complaint you have about the managed services world.

Jennifer Roy: No. And this is why I’m still here 15 years later — I like fast-paced. I always say my peak performance is at the brink of overwhelmed. Just before I’m overwhelmed, that is the time when I am at my best. The MSP industry keeps me on my toes. I actually can’t imagine leaving this space and going anywhere else. I love it.

Robert Dutt: Brilliant. Thanks for taking the time and sharing some of your insights.

Jennifer Roy: Thank you so much for having me. I appreciate your time.

[MUSIC]

Robert Dutt: There you have it — Jennifer Roy from Nucleus Networks.

I’d like to thank Jennifer for her time, and honestly, for her candor. This was not a corporate interview. She was remarkably open about what it feels like to take a job you’re not qualified for on paper, about the pressures of being one of the very few women CEOs in the MSP space, and about what people-first leadership actually costs you day to day when you’re reading every single employee comment and holding yourself publicly accountable when you get it wrong.

A few things that stuck with me. First, her point that customer service is what MSPs actually deliver — the technology is just the vehicle. Simple reframe, but I think a lot of MSP owners would run their businesses a little differently if they really internalized it. Second, the Lyra and Evergreen story. If you’ve been wondering what PE involvement actually looks like from the inside of a Canadian MSP, this is probably the most specific and honest account I’ve heard. Hiring someone in six hours through a sister company, getting proprietary code handed over, having boots on the ground in Australia through the network — those are real, tangible examples of what a platform can do for you. And third, her approach to AI. No hype, no panic — just practical applications like automated reporting and shadow AI mitigation that are already saving her team time and creating new conversations with clients.

If you enjoyed this conversation, please follow or subscribe to In The Channel. You can find us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, and most podcast directories. And if you’ve got a moment, a rating or review goes a long way toward helping other channel professionals find the show.

Until next time, I’m Robert Dutt for ChannelBuzz.ca, and I’ll see you in the channel.

Welcome to The Buzz from ChannelBuzz.ca, I’m Robert Dutt, today is Tuesday, April 21, 2026, and here’s what’s happening in the channel today.

Everpure, the company formerly known as Pure Storage, has unveiled a comprehensive overhaul of its global partner program. Moving away from traditional tiering based strictly on volume, the new framework focuses on an outcomes-led model designed to reward partners for service delivery and recurring revenue growth. Key features include a simplified incentive structure and enhanced technical support for managed service providers. According to Everpure, the change is intended to align more closely with how modern customers consume storage-as-a-service. For Canadian MSPs, this shift represents a significant opportunity to move beyond hardware resale. By prioritizing service outcomes over box-pushing, partners can leverage Everpure’s consumption-based models to build more predictable margin into their cloud and hybrid storage offerings. The update also includes new competency-based tracks that allow smaller, specialized firms to access benefits previously reserved for high-volume resellers.

Copado has officially launched Agentia, a new platform designed to integrate context-aware AI agents into Salesforce DevOps workflows. The tool is positioned by the company as a way to automate complex testing, documentation, and compliance tasks that typically require manual intervention. Copado claims that Agentia can understand the specific business logic of a Salesforce environment, allowing it to provide more accurate suggestions than general-purpose AI models. This launch is particularly relevant for Canadian solution providers managing large-scale Salesforce deployments. As talent shortages in specialized DevOps roles continue, the ability to automate routine oversight through AI agents could allow MSPs to scale their operations without a linear increase in headcount. By reducing the time required for quality assurance and release management, providers may be able to increase their project velocity while maintaining high standards for security and compliance.

Acer Gadget has announced a strategic investment in Plugable Technologies, a leading provider of USB and Thunderbolt peripherals. The investment is intended to accelerate the expansion of Acer’s peripheral portfolio, with a specific focus on AI-enabled docking stations and productivity tools. While Plugable will continue to operate as an independent brand, the two companies noted in a statement that they will collaborate on product development and global supply chain logistics. This deal signals a consolidation in the workspace technology sector. MSPs can expect to see a broader range of high-performance connectivity solutions that are increasingly integrated with Acer’s hardware ecosystem. As the hybrid work model evolves, the demand for sophisticated peripheral hardware remains high, and this partnership likely ensures better availability and integrated support for partners providing end-to-end hardware solutions to their clients. And for those of you who have been around the Canadian channel scene for a while, it’s worth mentioning that Plugable’s CEO is none other than Lynn Smurthwaite-Murphy.

Later today on In The Channel, I am joined by Jennifer Roy of Nucleus Networks to discuss the evolving landscape of channel leadership and the importance of mentorship in tech.

And if you haven’t heard it yet, be sure to check out my conversation from yesterday with Ben Yerushalmi of OutSystems, where we took a deep dive into the impact of low-code platforms on modern application development.

That’s how we’re seeing the headlines today. I’m Robert Dutt for ChannelBuzz.ca, thanks for listening.

Welcome to The Buzz from ChannelBuzz.ca, our brand spanking new daily podcast, giving you the latest headlines for the IT channel community every morning in five minutes or less.

I’m Robert Dutt, today is Monday, April 20, 2026, and here’s what’s happening in the channel today.

Fleet, the open-source device management platform, has officially launched its inaugural partner program, signaling a hard pivot to a 100 percent channel sales model. Founded in 2020 and born out of an open-source project at Facebook, Fleet’s technology enables organizations to manage and secure IT assets across MacOS, Windows, Linux, Android, and ChromeOS. According to CEO Mike McNeil, every sales deal will now flow exclusively through a partner. The new program features two distinct tracks: a reseller track for co-selling, and a services track geared specifically toward partners looking to build recurring revenue streams through implementation and managed services. For Canadian MSPs managing increasingly complex, mixed-device environments, Fleet offers an infrastructure-as-code approach to endpoint management that can help consolidate tool sprawl. The company is actively recruiting new partners and is reportedly offering financial incentives, including enhanced margins and deal protection, for solution providers who migrate customers away from established competitors like Jamf or Microsoft Intune.

Edge computing and virtualization vendor Scale Computing has unveiled its new Velocity Partner Program, shifting decisively away from traditional volume-based tiers to a fully competency-based model. The company says this new structure is engineered to help partners navigate the evolving virtualization market by reducing operational friction and increasing partner autonomy. According to Scale Computing, advancement in the Velocity program is now tied strictly to verified capabilities, ensuring that technical expertise—rather than raw sales volume—drives partner economics. The framework is designed to accelerate quote-to-close cycles and reduce dependency on vendor resources. For Canadian solution providers, this represents a faster path to revenue and far better margin predictability, especially for regional partners who might be penalized by strict volume quotas. The program also focuses heavily on enabling partners to capture more of the total value of each opportunity, specifically by driving professional services revenue around deployments of the company’s SC Platform and edge orchestration solutions.

N-able CEO John Pagliuca is advising the channel to take a highly measured approach to the artificial intelligence boom. In a recent interview, Pagliuca outlined a specific three-step journey for MSP AI adoption: efficiency first, safe deployment next, and monetization last. He noted that while the broader industry is rushing toward AI-driven revenue streams, MSPs must first focus on internal productivity gains and establishing data governance. According to N-able, the monetization opportunity will materialize as small and medium-sized businesses seek third-party help to navigate their own AI implementations and security challenges. For Canadian MSPs, this serves as a pragmatic reminder to prioritize internal automation and secure operational foundations before packaging artificial intelligence as a billable service. It echoes broader industry research suggesting that data governance remains a significant hurdle to AI adoption, reinforcing the need for partners to establish internal standards first.

Later today on In The Channel, I sit down with OutSystems channel chief Benjamin Yerushalmi to talk about defining the channel for three different technology waves over the years, and why AI is moving more partner revenue opportunities earlier in engagements.

And if you haven’t heard it yet, check out our chat with Alex Webb and Leanne Yeatman of F12.net on what they’ve learned from 20 years and 15-plus acquisitions, which dropped on Friday.

That’s how we’re seeing the headlines today. I’m Robert Dutt for ChannelBuzz.ca, thanks for listening. Have a great day.

Robert Dutt:  Hello and welcome to In the Channel from ChannelBuzz.ca, bringing news and information to the Canadian IT channel community for the last 16 years. I’m Robert Dutt, editor of ChannelBuzz.ca, and your host for the show.

If you go to F12.net right now — one of Canada’s largest managed service providers — you’ll find something you don’t see on most MSP websites. A page that says “Looking to sell? Let’s talk!” And it’s not vague. It lists exactly what they’re looking for and exactly what a seller gets. That kind of openness tells you something. It tells you that for F12, M&A isn’t opportunistic. It’s a core part of how they’ve grown from an Alberta basement operation in 1994 to a national MSP with over 500 employees and more than 15 acquisitions under their belt.

My guests today are Alex Webb, founder and CEO of F12.net, and Leanne Yeatman, Chief of Staff, who’s been deeply involved in the company’s acquisition strategy and adds some valuable perspective throughout our conversation. We cover the full picture here — how F12 decides what to buy and what to walk away from, what integration actually looks like after the deal closes, and what MSP owners on the other side of the table need to know if they’re thinking about selling someday. Alex also shares what it was like to recently go through a recapitalization of his own company, putting him on both sides of the M&A equation.

Let’s get right into it. My chat with Alex Webb and Leanne Yeatman.

Robert Dutt:  Alex, Leanne, thanks for joining us.

Alex Webb: Thanks.

Leanne Yeatman: Thank you for having us.

Robert Dutt:  Not every MSP has a “looking to sell” page on their website — much less one that is as prescriptive as listing what you’re looking for and what a potential seller gets. Pretty deliberate signal. When did M&A go from something that happened at F12 — an opportunity that came along — to something that became a core part of how you grow and something that you approach intentionally?

Alex Webb: Going back to the memory here — I would say that transition happened right around 2015. Prior to that, we did two acquisitions and they were more circumstantial, opportunistic, presented themselves more than us actually going out and seeking them out. But that shifted when we wanted to expand into a new region that we targeted. That region was Ontario. We were Alberta-based in 2014 and we had a plan to expand into two more provinces — Ontario being first, then BC being second. So I would say that was the date.

Robert Dutt:  Your first acquisition was CPU Technologies, way back in 2006 — 20 years ago. What was that experience like, and how much of what you do now was shaped by what you learned, for the good and the bad, doing it for the first time?

Alex Webb: I’ll actually let Leanne go first. She played a big role in that acquisition.

Leanne Yeatman: Going back a long time in history — that was our first transaction. It was different in the sense that we had some outside influence. One of our partners at the time, Wayne Scrivens, played a big role in coaching and teaching us what to look for and how to go through that process. I would say it was foundational in that it sparked this desire to do it more and to recognize that this can be a huge part of our growth story. It’s not the only piece of the journey, of course, but it definitely was a foundational moment for us. And while no two transactions are the same, there are obviously similarities. The more you do it, the more you look back and remember the specific things that went well and the things that maybe didn’t go so well — that you would do differently if given another shot.

I remember the details very clearly still to this day.

What we learned in that early phase of the CPU acquisition was that when you don’t have the relationships, it’s very hard to convert clients, because they don’t trust you, they don’t know you, they don’t believe you. You have to work really hard to build that trust. That was the biggest education we had: that integration and converting clients was going to be way harder than we thought.

Robert Dutt:  Obviously it didn’t scare you off, because you’ve done 15 or so acquisitions over those last 20 years. Is there a rhythm to it? Is it a “you’re always looking” kind of thing, or do you find it comes in waves?

Alex Webb: I would say waves. We found it a little easier to have a few acquisitions brought in and do that integration work together, because you’re usually assembling teams, and it tends to work a little better than fully integrating one and then starting another. You can do a lot of things in tandem, because you’re generally ripping and tearing not only at their systems but at your own — learning as you go all of the inadequacies in your own systems that need to be redeveloped. That work has to happen while you’re doing integration. So we just found it a little easier to do them in waves.

Robert Dutt:  The technology tradition of batching — it kind of makes sense from that regard too. Your website lists the criteria you look for: north of $5 million in revenue, low churn, a majority of managed services, healthy EBITDA. Those are the table stakes. What’s the stuff that’s not on the website? What makes you lean in on a company that maybe looks more marginal on paper but gives you a good vibe — or conversely, walk away from one that checks all the boxes but just leaves you with a “no” feeling?

Alex Webb: Culture plays a big role. The depth in the organization — how distributed is the effort? Does it all sit on one or two people? Or, even if they’re smaller, have they found ways to distribute the workload across the team?

The test of resiliency in the organization matters too. Sometimes longevity brings a certain amount of resilience to a team and a culture. Sometimes experience doing their own expansions or acquisitions brings some of that. That’s important, because when you go through integration, things change — and not just for one entity. A wise person in the industry once explained it to us as: there are two cultures, and both cultures change and become one going forward. The pressure integration puts on both teams is significant. So you really want to look for a team that’s going to be able to weather that storm — one that has a good amount of trust built up with their leadership and with each other.

Robert Dutt:  How much of the decision comes down to the owner? Their personality, their readiness to move, what they want their life to look like after the acquisition?

Alex Webb: That’s a big one. The motivation for why they want to do it is a key ingredient. We try to get to that early, because in M&A, some owners might feel like they can get a little more value out of the business if they portray that they’re staying — but it’s actually traumatic on the business when the alignment is wrong. So we work really hard up front to figure out what’s actually going on. And it’s okay if you want to transition out, or if you want to stay and we work a role around you. Those are very important ingredients for a successful integration outcome.

Sometimes there’s indecision — do I want to be part of it or do I want to leave? We just help them with that. We make it okay either way. F12 is a good home for their people and their clients, so they don’t have to worry about that part. We can concentrate our efforts on the outcome the owner actually wants.

Robert Dutt:  To Leanne’s point about two cultures becoming one — you close the deal, it’s Monday morning. I presume champagne pops, but that’s just my vision of how these things work. What does that first week actually look like for the employees and the clients of the company you just acquired?

Alex Webb: If you’ve done it right, it doesn’t feel any different. I know that’s a bizarre answer, but I think that’s what people build up in their minds — that day one, a bunch of things are going to change. Balloons and fanfare. And really you just wake up Monday morning and, you know what, we need to collect some money, answer the phone, go to the client site. All of the things just keep happening. The only difference is generally that there’s a little more money in your bank account than there was the day before — and that’s significantly the only difference.

That’s a bit of an out-of-body experience for most owners who’ve never done it. The real work starts more like two or three weeks in. You want things to be business-as-usual for a beat, and then you’re working through the integration plan and executing against it. But that doesn’t happen on Monday morning.

Robert Dutt:  After 15 or more acquisitions, what have you learned about that integration process? How does the playbook look different now than it did for deal three or four — once you’d realized you were going to do this more than once, but before it had become the muscle memory it is today?

Alex Webb: I can say for sure what we don’t do: don’t call it a merger anymore. That’s the tendency with people who are new to it — “we’re merging, we’re going to take the best of both businesses.” That communication is false, because inevitably an acquisition is going to become one entity, and you’re not going to change the processes of the mothership too quickly. You might learn some things and adapt, but you’re not going to adopt their RMM tool or their PSA tool — not likely, because you’ve done so much work building your own. On the communication side, we’re very clear on that now. I think we presented it more like a merger in those earlier days, and it didn’t create a better outcome.

The better outcome comes when it’s highly communicative all the way through the process, so people know what’s going on and can plan accordingly.

Leanne Yeatman: I’d add two things. One — you can’t outsource the integration work. You can use outside parties to support it, but the leadership team needs to be present and own those pieces of integration very intently. And two — really understand the essence of the business: the things that make the culture what it is, the things that drive people’s loyalty and love for that entity. Make sure you foster those things and allow them to continue.

Robert Dutt:  What does that transition look like? When you acquire a company, they have their own name, their own culture, their own way of doing things. How do you handle that — it doesn’t sound like it’s “welcome to F12” from day one?

Alex Webb: It starts with core systems — getting the tools in place so that we have shared visibility into how the business is performing. That’s the first wave.

What we’ve discovered from a culture perspective is that you can still have your identity as a region, as a location. Just because the logo is different, that doesn’t need to change how you do things. You can still have that Friday lunch if that’s what you did. You can still have the barbecues. You could still race RC cars in the parking lot. We don’t need to have a brand above the door to enable those things — but it’s bizarre how people interpret that they’re suddenly not allowed to do them anymore. So for us, it’s about being, as Leanne said, very intentional — making sure people continue doing the things that kept that culture alive.

Then when the logo changes over, it shouldn’t feel that different other than it’s a different brand. And now there’s marketing support, sales support, and a lot of things that help that business that they didn’t have before. If you’ve done it right, you’ve added capabilities, expanded the offerings, and people can be more successful and feel more security about their future. That’s the magic. When that occurs, retention stays high — for both clients and team members.

Robert Dutt:  You mentioned that you initially started doing acquisitions to expand geographically, and a lot of your acquisitions have looked like that going across Canada. AMTRA Solutions last year looks a little different, though — that’s a capability play, adding Microsoft Cloud and AI Copilot expertise. Is what you’re looking for in an acquisition changing?

Alex Webb: It certainly is — or, maybe I should rephrase: it’s not so much changing as expanding. We’re still doing what we did on the geographic side, but we’re now adding strategic capabilities as an additional objective. For us, it’s either build it or buy it, and if it makes sense to buy it and bring that capability in, we will.

AMTRA really presented a very unique opportunity. In full transparency — when clients get larger, into that upper mid-market range of roughly 350 to 500 seats, their IT needs shift from what a traditional managed service provider does. We handle level one, level two, level three help desk, patch management, backup, infrastructure management — all of those things. But as those organizations get a little larger, the needs change. They want to bring in more advanced Microsoft capabilities, and we would either lose those clients to larger enterprise providers, or bring those capabilities in-house. AMTRA presented that opportunity. It’s been incredibly successful, and we’ve been able to bring those technologies to our upper-end clients in a way that’s really working.

Robert Dutt:  Without tipping your hand on anything specific — where are the gaps? Is the next chapter more geography, more capability, or are you looking at different frontiers altogether?

Alex Webb: For us, the primary frontier is still geographic expansion — into Central Canada and Eastern Canada. That’s still on the to-do list. We also have our eye on more advanced security capabilities, because that’s forever changing and moving more toward the AI front. And we’re not ruling out ERP — the things I like to see are capabilities that all of our clients could utilize and benefit from. When we look at ERP applications, Dynamics 365, these are technologies that the broader client base can use and benefit from, having a mid-market provider able to bring them to market at scale.

And we’re not ruling out going south of the border either. We already have clients in the U.S., and we’re starting to see opportunities in states just adjacent to Canada.

Robert Dutt:  In December, Clairvest exited and Audax came in. You’ve spent 20 years as the buyer. What was it like to be on the other side of that process — having someone evaluate your company the way you evaluate the companies you acquire?

Alex Webb: It gives me a lot of empathy for what we put our sellers through. How’s that for an answer?

It’s tiring. It was a tiring process. It’s enjoyable on a lot of fronts, and incredibly rewarding when it’s done. But the six to eight months leading up to it — that was a ton of work for the organization. We had some really good support from our banking partners, from Clairvest, and the Audax team were terrific to work with. But even with all that, a lot of work and a lot of sleepless nights.

That wasn’t our first experience on that side of the table, though. That was our third private equity transaction. We’ve been through it a few times — just enough to stay in tune with what it actually feels like.

Robert Dutt:  You’ve got the muscle memory built on both sides of the equation — that’s an interesting place to be. You mentioned how it gave you empathy for what sellers go through. Did going through it change anything about how you think about and deal with the sellers you work with? Or did it confirm what you already believed, having lived as an MSP in this industry?

Alex Webb: I think it did both. It confirmed some things, and I think we approach the process with a little more maturity now — on how we handle due diligence, data collection, and integration strategy — because every time you go through it from the other side, you learn a little more. And even when we’re not going through a full business integration, we’re still integrating at a board level, reporting to different people, going through change when you move from one private equity partner to another. I think that leveled us up a little bit and is making us stronger on the buyer side — helping sellers through the process with a little more elegance.

Robert Dutt:  A lot of MSP owners hear “private equity” and get nervous. They picture cost-cutting and layoffs. From your point of view — having been through it a few times now — what actually changes when you have an institutional capital partner? Does it speed up acquisitions? Redirect them? Put guardrails on them?

Alex Webb: Every private equity firm has their own view of what a good target looks like. So for any listeners thinking about private equity, it’s really critical that you align on strategy upfront. That becomes part of the conversation — what’s the tolerance, how does this look, who’s driving the acquisitions? These are important questions.

Generally speaking, the private equity partners we’ve worked with liked that we had M&A capability and could hit the ground running. But the types of businesses and the size of acquisitions does change as you grow and move from one partner to the next. As your business gets larger, you can take on larger transactions.

Leanne Yeatman: I’d add — knowing what you want to get out of the relationship and how you intend to continue operating the business with that new partner is critical. What we would do leading up to any transaction is decide on the top three things we were looking for in a new partner and what our vision for the organization was for the next five years — then stay focused on that through the process, to make sure you’re finding the partner that’s going to help you execute that vision. When done well, it should be a true partnership. It comes down to alignment.

Robert Dutt:  You’ve sat across the table from a lot of MSP owners who want to sell. What’s the most common disconnect between what they think their company is worth and what the market says it’s worth?

Alex Webb: I would answer that with their understanding of what should be normalized in the business and what shouldn’t — as it relates to EBITDA. The multiples vary a little, but M&A is generally a multiple of EBITDA. So what is that EBITDA, and what’s normalized?

The biggest disconnect usually comes from owners running what you might call a lifestyle business — where a lot of their personal world is woven into the business finances. When it comes to doing a transaction, it’s very tricky to determine what’s truly in the business and what isn’t, and to convince the accountants, bankers, and funders of what the real number is.

Owners who operate with a clean separation — who take a dividend and keep their personal world out of the business P&L — those are by far the easiest transactions, and you might even pay a little more for a company that runs a pure P&L. That’s one of those intrinsic things we look for.

Robert Dutt:  In your experience, how many owners who say they want to sell are actually ready to sell? And what does “not ready” look like when you’re sitting across the table?

Alex Webb: Tough to quantify, but I’d say it’s usually not a matter of “no” — it’s “not right now.” Either they’re ready and it makes sense, or they just need another year or two to readjust and get things to where they need to be.

Everybody has a number in their mind: “If I could get this number for my business, I would sell it.” But nobody wants to reveal that number, because maybe they’d get more. The reality is, people who know their number and understand the mechanics of what it’s going to take to get there tend to have more success. Maybe they’re there now, or maybe they can get there in six months.

But that’s the financial side. The mental side is probably trickier. Am I ready to let go? Am I ready to report into an entity? Am I ready to walk off into the sunset? Because sometimes the motivation for doing the transaction is fear — fear of industry change, all of the AI coming, feeling like you’re not ready to compete. That can be traumatic for an owner, because they’re doing it from a position of fear rather than from a position of opportunity for themselves and for their family.

Robert Dutt:  There’s a whole generation of MSP founders who started their businesses in the nineties and early 2000s who are approaching retirement. Is that creating a wave? And if so, does that make it a buyer’s market?

Alex Webb: I would still say it’s a seller’s market. The multiples are still high, there’s still lots of opportunity, and the industry loves businesses focused on recurring revenue with multi-year contracts — there’s real value in those businesses.

As for the retiring founders — I’d say we’re just at the beginning of that wave. I haven’t seen a meaningful change in M&A deal flow as a result of it yet. But I believe we’re at the beginning, as some of these groups hit their late fifties and early sixties and start thinking about succession. In fact, I just had one of those conversations recently.

Robert Dutt:  If I’m an MSP owner three to five years away from wanting to sell, what should I be doing right now to put myself in the best position — not just financially, but operationally and personally?

Alex Webb: I’ll let Leanne start with this one.

Leanne Yeatman: Build depth in the organization — have multiple leaders present and capable of guiding the rest of the organization through that change. On the normalization side, be clear on what’s acceptable going forward: anything personal that’s wrapped up in the business should start coming out. And third — focus on organic growth. Being able to demonstrate that the business is actively growing and has the ability to keep moving forward. Those three would be my top priorities.

Alex Webb: I would add — bring your management team into the conversation when you’re ready to start thinking about a sale. It’s a tough situation when an owner goes through the LOI and due diligence process and then reveals it to the team at the very end. Everybody feels like, “why didn’t you trust me with this earlier?” Bringing them into the dialogue — saying “here’s what I’m thinking about” — you get their input, you get buy-in, you work it together.

We do that even when we’re going into a transaction ourselves. When we were going through the Clairvest to Audax transition, we didn’t do it as a cloak-and-dagger move. It was intentional. And I think when it’s done that way, the outcome is even better.

Leanne Yeatman: Exactly. The length of the process — if you’ve been in that seat for six or eight months going through due diligence, you’ve already had the time to mentally transition yourself to what’s next. But everybody else at close is just finding out. The more people who are part of that journey earlier, the easier that first week and beyond is.

Robert Dutt:  My last question — if you could sit down with every MSP owner in Canada at one big table and tell them one thing about M&A that they probably don’t want to hear, what is it?

Alex Webb: That recurring contract revenue needs to actually be in managed services. Meaning: you’re getting compensated on a contract whether you put a person out there or not. Recurring professional services — that isn’t managed services.

This comes out in due diligence. People take that bucket of revenue and pile it in, trying to present it as managed services. But it gets found out and the deal gets discounted.

So: be really clear about your lines of business. What’s product, what’s professional services, what’s managed services. You can have recurring professional services, and if it’s contractual, you’ll get a little more for it. But if you have true managed services, isolate it — because it won’t have the same revenue volatility, and you’ll get better rewarded for it.

And if you want to improve your position, convert that recurring professional services to recurring managed services. It’s a lot of work, but we’ve successfully done that through integration for years. People are afraid to have those conversations — it goes back to the old time-and-materials, block-time days. That was the first wave. But when you look at block time and ask “why does this revenue move up and down?” — well, that’s because it’s getting classified as managed services when it isn’t.

To hammer again on normalizations: less normalizations will actually benefit you more.

Robert Dutt:  Great insights, and I appreciate you sharing what you’ve learned through 20 years of acquisitions. Good luck on the next 15.

Alex Webb: Thank you very much.

Leanne Yeatman: Get it.

Robert Dutt:  There you have it — Alex Webb and Leanne Yeatman from F12.net.

I’d like to thank Alex and Leanne for their time and for their candor. These aren’t always easy conversations to have publicly, and they were both remarkably open about what they’ve learned across 15-plus acquisitions and 30 years of building the company.

A few things that stuck with me from this conversation.

First, the shift from opportunistic to intentional. 2015 was the year that F12 decided M&A wasn’t just something that happened when a deal fell into their lap, but a deliberate growth strategy. That distinction matters, because it changes everything about how you prepare, how you evaluate, and how you integrate.

Second, the culture point. Alex and Leanne both kept coming back to the idea that the numbers can look perfect and you still walk away if the culture isn’t right. And on the flip side, integration isn’t about slapping your logo on the door — it’s about two cultures becoming one new thing. “You don’t need a brand above the door to race RC cars in the parking lot,” as Alex put it.

And third — and this is the one I think every MSP owner listening needs to sit with — Alex’s closer about recurring professional services versus managed services. If your recurring revenue is really just project work on a retainer, that gets found out in due diligence and your deal gets discounted. That’s specific, actionable, and probably uncomfortable for more than a few people listening.

If you found this episode valuable, I’d appreciate it if you’d follow or subscribe to the show. We’re on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, and most other podcast directories. And if you’ve got a minute, a rating or a review goes a long way to helping other people in the channel find us.

Until next time, I’m Robert Dutt for ChannelBuzz.ca, and I’ll see you in the channel.

Robert Dutt: Hello and welcome to In The Channel from ChannelBuzz.ca, bringing news and information to the Canadian IT channel community for the last 16 years. I’m Robert Dutt, editor of ChannelBuzz.ca and your host for the show.

There’s a phrase you’re probably hearing more and more in customer conversations: data sovereignty. And if you’re not hearing it yet, you probably will soon. Canada’s regulatory landscape around data is shifting fast. Quebec’s Law 25 is already in force with real financial penalties. Bill C-8, the Critical Cyber Systems Protection Act, is working its way through committee. New federal privacy reform is expected this spring, and underneath all of that, there’s a growing realization that the old assumption—that if it’s okay for the U.S., it’s okay for us—may not hold up much longer.

My guest today is Rob Falzon, Head of Engineering in the Office of the CTO at Check Point Software Technologies. Rob has spent over 30 years in large-scale security architecture, including government work, and he’s been with Check Point for over two decades. He’s based here in Canada and has a front-row seat to how this market handles security and compliance differently from the rest of the world. We’re going to talk about what’s driving the urgency around data sovereignty in Canada right now, the distinction between data residency and data sovereignty that a lot of partners are still conflating, and what it all means practically for MSPs serving the Canadian mid-market.

Let’s get right into it—my chat with Rob Falzon.

Rob, thanks for taking the time. I appreciate it.

Robert Falzon: No trouble.

Robert Dutt: You’ve been in the industry a long time, with Check Point for two decades, and you’ve had a front-row seat to how the Canadian market specifically handles security and compliance. For an audience of Canadian VARs and MSPs, how has the data conversation in Canada changed over, say, the last 18 months or so? It feels like something’s shifted in that discussion.

Robert Falzon: Yeah, there’s been a significant shift. In the past, obviously, we’ve seen the changes that have happened with our neighbors to the south and how the climate and atmosphere have changed. It’s caused folks in Canada to have a closer look at what their various different arrangements are from a trust perspective, and what their comfort level might be in where they store their data and how they manage that data—and where their customers are based as well.

I think that’s been the primary change in the last few months specifically. For a long time, we’ve had this feeling that Canada and the U.S. have been sort of the same. There wasn’t really a big concern because we have agreements back and forth. A lot of the recent changes have forced us to really revisit those arrangements and see: are we actually making sure that the information is safe and protected? As a result of that, we’ve been getting those questions at Check Point, and it’s incumbent upon us to manage it in such a way that our customers get the security and safety they need while meeting their business requirements.

Robert Dutt: From the regulatory side of things, there’s a lot going on. We have Quebec’s Law 25 in place with real penalties behind it. We have Bill C-8 working its way through committee. There’s going to be PIPEDA reform coming up sometime fairly soon, which is rumored to include data sovereignty provisions. Back in November, the government introduced the Digital Sovereignty Framework. For a Canadian MSP who hasn’t been tracking all of this closely, what’s the picture they need to have in their head right now of the regulatory scene?

Robert Falzon: Well, like you pointed out, there’s no comprehensive federal law just yet. As you mentioned, there are a number of things on the table and we have some direct focus now from the federal government. There’s a minister assigned specifically for AI that’s taking a very close look at how Canada is managing that. We also have this provincial patchwork. Ontario probably has the most established AI-specific roles so far. Alberta’s Privacy Commissioner also has a report they released last year talking about Alberta creating its own AI law and updating its privacy legislation.

All of these changes are happening fairly quickly right now, and it’s incumbent upon MSPs to make sure they’re aware of what these changes are and where they are operating their businesses. There are two aspects to this. The first is the business side: if you have customers that want to consume your services, you need to make sure your services are consumable by them—that you are meeting their data regulation requirements and that the residency and sovereignty requirements these new pieces of legislation introduce are met by whatever services you’re providing.

The challenge is that there’s not a lot of clarity right now around what these actual services are. Maybe AI is touching it, or some security component is touching it, but maybe it’s a different type of service related to marketing. This is going to be a challenge for MSPs to make sure they understand their compliance obligations and to closely look at their service offerings. They need to start to decouple what we used to think was an accepted understanding—that if it was okay for the U.S., it was okay for us. It’s not going to be the same anymore.

Robert Dutt: There’s another piece of legislation, not necessarily on our side, but the CLOUD Act hanging over all this. Can you walk us through how the CLOUD Act changes the calculus for Canadian organizations using a U.S.-headquartered cloud or security provider?

Robert Falzon: There are a few things here to unpack. First of all, it’s not finalized; there are still a lot of negotiations underway. This started back in 2021 or 2022, and obviously, when that started, we were in a completely different geopolitical context than we have today. That’s transformed things into a more complex policy debate and even, to some degree, a national security debate.

For us, we’re going to have to start looking very carefully about what regulations we put in place at the federal level that impact us from a legal compliance perspective. Is your CISO well aware of what your obligations are under this? I think if I look at what’s going to change, we’re still going to have to start hosting much of the information we work with in Canada. Anything related to security rule sets, business transaction information—all of this is going to have to be stored in Canada.

If you are still leveraging contracts that you might have in the U.S., you’re going to have to look at how you separate out those specific types of data that are protected by law and have them processed and stored in Canada. You may not be able to get out of some of these hosting contracts in the U.S., but the fact is, if that data is in the U.S., it’s going to be available to the U.S. government. If that availability contravenes any legislation we have here, it’s something you’re going to be liable for.

Robert Dutt: A lot of times, maybe at the customer level and the partner level, there’s some conflation between data residency and data sovereignty. Can you break that apart? I think when a lot of people hear, “We have a Canadian data center,” they assume the compliance checkbox is checked.

Robert Falzon: Yeah. The difference fundamentally is essentially data at rest versus data in motion. If you are storing databases or static information about customers, that data must be resident in Canada. Data sovereignty is essentially the entire chain. Any processing has to be done in Canada, storage has to be done in Canada—the data cannot leave the country or its control sphere the entire time it’s in your possession. I think that’s a critical differentiation because they are often, as you say, conflated to be the same thing.

Robert Dutt: What does a sovereignty-defensible architecture actually look like? What are the non-negotiables to make sure you’re covered off there, especially as a service provider?

Robert Falzon: You have to look at all of your vendors. You have to make sure that not only are you managing your data effectively yourself, but that all of the vendors you interact with are also following the same guidelines. The challenge here is that we are so integrated with U.S. providers—cloud providers, data center providers. All of those things need to come together, and we need to be aware at all times where this information is stored.

Our understanding of where that data is has to improve, so we need better tools to manage that visibility. But we also need to start making actual changes in our infrastructure to make sure it physically resides in Canada. And then we need to look at the rule sets you’re using to manage that data. Do you have the proper security context to store and manipulate that information strictly in Canada as per data sovereignty regulations?

Robert Dutt: Let’s bring this to the partner level. There’s a recent survey from Kiteworks that shows 23% of Canadian organizations experienced a data sovereignty incident last year. Mid-market firms lag enterprise by 15 to 25 percentage points in maturity, but they face the same penalties. For an MSP serving that mid-market space, where’s the actual opportunity in terms of educating and compliance?

Robert Falzon: Well, if MSPs are at the stage where they’re concerned and trying to get information, imagine where many of our customers are standing. Customers are trusting their partners to provide them with guidance and leadership. If we think about verticals like healthcare, financial services, or the public sector—these are not organizations that typically have heavy internal services or the skill sets to make these decisions about where their cloud data is processed.

They’re relying on partners for that. If there are issues, the buck stops with the customer themselves. By helping to educate their customers—making them aware of coming changes, understanding the differences between sovereignty and residency, and looking at their other vendors—partners can take a leadership position. There’s a bit of a vacuum right now in speaking with both partners and customers, where everybody’s just going, “I wonder what’s going to happen next? Am I even ready for this?” It’s a great opportunity to improve their business.

Robert Dutt: Is the first question to that customer the general, “Do you know where your data is living and who has access to it?” Or what’s the first concrete question an MSP can take to their customers?

Robert Falzon: Well, there are a whole lot of things. First, partners are going to have a better understanding of their customer profile. If they have customers with significant multi-cloud complexity or exposure to the CLOUD Act, they’ll want to start by talking to them about their immediate risk.

The challenge we often have is that we want to go in and talk about how a product or service is going to make a difference. Ultimately, what we really need to do is share the conversation about risk. The risk conversation is often overlooked in favor of saying, “I’d like this customer to buy some more Check Point.” But at the end of the day, all of that comes back to their understanding of what the risk is. I would start with risk: talk about what’s in the CLOUD Act, talk about complexity, and talk to them about AI data exfiltration and how that impacts leakage from a legal perspective. Stay away from conversations about specific products and focus on the business outcomes for the customers. That’s what’s going to get you the traction.

Robert Dutt: Check Point launched a dedicated Canadian region for CloudGuard Web Application Firewall in March at the Victoria Privacy Summit. What’s driving security vendors specifically to put in infrastructure in Canada right now?

Robert Falzon: This is an interesting question because it’s really not a “right now” thing. This is something we’ve been actively looking at for some time. It’s not as easy as just saying, “I’m going to do this in Canada only.” There’s a lot of backend stuff that has to happen. Five years ago, the technology and infrastructure available were somewhat limited. You have to be able to trust the infrastructure you’re placed in.

It’s taken years to get here, and we’re quite confident in our ability to deliver the exact same level of quality as we did when it was solely based in the U.S. Countries around the world are starting to take a close look at their most important assets—data and intellectual property—and seeing how easily technology is being used to gain access to private information. Companies would be well-served to understand that this has been a long cycle; it’s not something that just happened overnight.

Robert Dutt: For a partner who’s already selling Check Point solutions, what practically changes for them now that this Canadian data region is in place? What deals or conversations does it unlock?

Robert Falzon: Certainly anywhere where privacy is paramount, it’s going to have a huge impact because you can start the conversation with the understanding that anything we’re talking about today is going to be data resident and data sovereign to your Canadian customers. That immediately sets you apart from many other vendors who cannot make that claim.

If you can address the concern of privacy legislation right out of the gate, then you can focus on the actual business outcomes. It’s going to open doors with agencies very sensitive to this—government entities at the municipal, federal, and provincial levels that might have been off-the-table to a partner that didn’t have solutions meeting those criteria.

Robert Dutt: For the MSP who’s a little earlier in the process, what’s the first practical step internally to make sure you’re building this out as an opportunity?

Robert Falzon: You have to be extremely well-educated in the legal aspects because you’re going to want to make sure you have a compliance story and accountability you can speak to with your customers. But looking at all the uncertainty relating to AI and machine learning, being able to tie data residency and sovereignty into how that impacts their ability to utilize these new technologies would be a real door opener.

There’s a tremendous amount of misunderstanding and lack of information available to customers currently running these solutions. If I were a partner today, I’d be looking at how I have the conversation about security, privacy, and data sovereignty in terms of their ability to be more competitive in the future by leveraging these advanced technologies in a secure way.

Robert Dutt: What’s the risk of doing nothing? If I’m a partner and I decide to just keep selling the same way and assume data sovereignty is someone else’s problem, what does that look like 12 months from now?

Robert Falzon: Hopefully your customers are already taking a zero-trust approach, so it might be easy to say, “I’ll wait until this settles a bit.” It’s not crazy to think that could still be effective. But if one waits too long and it becomes legislation, now you’re playing catch-up. You won’t be perceived as a leader in the space, and as we know, it’s much harder to win business away from someone else than it is to keep business you already have.

Robert Dutt: Last question: what’s the thing about data sovereignty in Canada right now that you think isn’t getting enough attention?

Robert Falzon: I think honestly, the conversation about data sovereignty and residency itself is not mentioned enough. It seems to be addressed after the fact. I’m starting to see it come to the forefront, but I still don’t have conversations on a daily basis about this. Even though this announcement was made, I’m still not getting a lot of phone calls about what this means for me, and I would have expected to get a lot more.

If we look forward five years, we’ll look back at this and go, “Wow, I can’t believe we only just got that then.” Things are moving so rapidly. If we look at the adoption of AI internal to large corporations—I’ll ask them if they are using AI services, where those services are based, and what the legal ramifications are. Nobody is talking about where the data from ChatGPT lives.

There was a legal judgment in the U.S. a couple of weeks back where it was agreed that all data entered into ChatGPT belongs to them—it belongs to OpenAI. Imagine if that’s your company’s data, and you don’t even know it’s leaving because the services you’ve invested in are hosting data all over the world and not in Canada. That’s a risk that’s really not being discussed in an appropriate way.

Robert Dutt: It’s an interesting indicator. If the conversation isn’t happening early, it suggests we’re still early in the cycle, and that’s an opportunity for an MSP to stake out a brand in this space.

Robert Falzon: Exactly. At this very moment, anyone in the partner ecosystem should be looking at their internal systems and processes and finding out how compliant they are personally. If you don’t understand your internal architecture and what partnerships you have in your own pipeline, you’re going to be well behind when it actually comes to implementation.

Robert Dutt: Great insights. Thank you very much for your time, Rob.

Robert Falzon: Thank you so much.

Robert Dutt: There you have it, Rob Falzon from Check Point Software Technologies. I’d like to thank Rob for his time and for a conversation that I think went well beyond the usual talking points. Thank you for listening.

Here’s a few things that stood out for me from this conversation. First, there’s a really important distinction between data residency and data sovereignty that Rob laid out cleanly. Residency is about where the data sits at rest. Sovereignty is about the entire chain—processing, storage, the works—and making sure none of it leaves the country’s control sphere. If your customers think having a Canadian data center checks the compliance box, that’s a conversation worth having with them.

Second, there was that striking point about AI data exfiltration. A recent U.S. legal judgment held that all data entered into ChatGPT belongs to OpenAI. If your customers are using AI services and don’t know where that data is going and who owns it once it gets there, that’s a risk that most people simply aren’t talking about yet.

And that brings me to what I think was the most telling moment: Rob’s candid admission that even after Check Point’s Canada data region announcement, he’s not getting a lot of calls about data residency. That tells me we’re still early. The regulatory picture is coming into focus, but it’s not fully formed yet, and a lot of partners and customers are in wait-and-see mode. That’s actually an opportunity. If you’re an MSP who moves now—gets educated on the regulatory landscape, audits your own internal compliance, and starts leading the sovereignty conversation with your customers—you have a chance to stake out real expertise and become the trusted voice before this becomes urgent and everyone’s scrambling.

Follow or subscribe to the show. You can find In The Channel on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, and most podcast directories. Ratings and reviews are always appreciated—they help other folks in the channel find us. Until next time, I’m Robert Dutt for ChannelBuzz.ca, and I’ll see you in the channel.

Robert Dutt: Hello and welcome to In the Channel from ChannelBuzz.ca, bringing news and information to the Canadian IT channel community for the last 16 years. I’m Robert Dutt, editor of ChannelBuzz.ca, and your host for the show.

My guest today is JoeAnne Hardy, president of WBM Technologies. WBM is one of those companies that if you’re in the Canadian channel, you’ve probably seen on the lists—the CRN Elite 150, nine years running, FastRiser on the SP500—but the story behind those rankings is more interesting than the rankings themselves.

WBM started in 1950 as Western Business Machines, a storefront in Saskatoon selling typewriters. 75 years later, it’s a managed services provider with more than 500 IT professionals across five cities in Western Canada and a growing US operation. JoeAnne has been there for more than 20 years. She started as a sales assistant, worked in virtually every department, led a management buyout, and today runs the whole show.

We talk about what it actually feels like to reinvent a company across multiple technology eras; the moment she realized her own success was making her life worse and what she did about it; building and keeping a team from a prairie base; the decision to take growth capital from Westcap; and what’s ahead in a market where supply chains are under serious pressure and AI is reshaping what managed services even means. Let’s get right into it. My chat with JoeAnne Hardy.

JoeAnne, thanks for taking the time. I appreciate it.

JoeAnne Hardy: Good to be here. Thanks for having me.

Robert Dutt: WBM opened its doors on May 1st, 1950 in Saskatoon as Western Business Machines, obviously pre-computer by any definition we know. Now you’re a CRN Elite 150 MSP for nine consecutive years. What does it actually feel like from the inside to lead a company through that many transitions, and how do you decide when it’s time to let go of something that’s still working?

JoeAnne Hardy: Well, what a big question to start with! Full disclosure, I have not been here since 1950. My journey at WBM started in 1996, but it is really a privilege to be part of an organization that does have this tremendous history in Western Canada.

I think our history is really a testament to evolution around the right things. For us, that evolution has been evolving around our customers and our customer needs. We’ve got a picture that hangs in our Saskatoon Operations Centre from the 50s. The shingle says Western Business Machines and in the window there are posters for typewriters and adders. If we had clung to being experts in typewriters, we wouldn’t be here today.

What we know with certainty is that we existed before the internet, and our business is not centered around technology evolutions—it’s centered around our client community. That makes sure we’re relevant, whether what we do today exists in 18 months or not.

Robert Dutt: You mentioned the anxiety that can come with some of these pivots. Was there ever a pivot point that was scarier or one where you’re looking around the table like, “I don’t know what the outcome is going to be here”?

JoeAnne Hardy: There is one thing that comes to mind. In 2008, myself, Brett Bailey, and Bob Hardy did a management buyout. We closed our deal right before the financial collapse. We reached a point where we had our partnership meetings on Tuesday mornings, and the business was doing great.

But I came to one of those meetings and I wasn’t feeling so great. I felt like something was really upside down—that the better the business did, the worse my life was getting. It’s the “curse of the entrepreneur.” I didn’t know if I had another hour in the day to give.

I said that out loud, and both Bob and Brett felt the same way. We decided in that moment that we wanted to create an environment where the better the business did, the better our lives got. The secret was building a leadership team around us. Since that point, we’ve completed nine acquisitions, expanded across Western Canada, opened a US entity, and taken on a private equity partner. And we’ve had fun the entire time.

Robert Dutt: How has that been reflected throughout the ranks of the organization since you made that change?

JoeAnne Hardy: We see it in all different ways. A number of years ago, we set a goal to contribute a million dollars back to the communities we live and work in over a five-year period. We hit that goal in 2025—which was our 75th anniversary—just three years in. These initiatives aren’t decided in a boardroom; they come from the connections our team members have in the community.

Robert Dutt: You worked your way up from being a sales assistant. How does having been throughout the business in different roles shape how you lead it now?

JoeAnne Hardy: I grew up on a cattle ranch in Maple Creek, Saskatchewan. I learned the value of hard work and understanding how things work. Because that was my upbringing, it felt natural at WBM to be curious.

Probably the biggest way it impacts my leadership is that when we have a problem, you have to go right to the people doing the work. They’re in front of the customers. Decisions shouldn’t just be made by “smart people in a boardroom.” You have to maintain that curiosity about what the frontline roadblocks are.

Robert Dutt: You have offices in Regina, Calgary, Vancouver, and Winnipeg, with headquarters still in Saskatoon. Is being outside the big city tech hubs a disadvantage, or is it part of the value proposition?

JoeAnne Hardy: I think it’s part of the value proposition. When we sit down in a governance meeting and we’re telling stories about a local restaurant in their community, it’s a differentiator.

One of our customers, Federated Co-op, has retail locations far and wide. When the team supporting them through our enterprise service desk showed up for their first meeting, they introduced themselves by their local Co-op member numbers.

Robert Dutt: When you’re hiring, how do you think about values or gut-based “feel” versus technical credentials?

JoeAnne Hardy: It has to be a fit on both sides. Hiring isn’t an individual sport; it’s a team sport. It’s important for many members of our team to be involved so they can give an honest assessment of how an individual would thrive here. We want to live up to being a great place to build a career.

Robert Dutt: Let’s talk about right now. Your monthly procurement update has become must-read for me. You’re telling customers to “buy the RAM” for the life of the system right now. What are you seeing day-to-day on that front?

JoeAnne Hardy: Our customers look to us for expertise in supply chain management. Our role is helping them manage their lifecycle, and that insight comes from deep relationships with manufacturers and distributors.

Our ability to help our customers be insulated from the impact of these things is a big differentiator. We have warehouses across Western Canada, so we can help customers think proactively. Our job is to make our customers heroes in their own organizations so they can take that information to their leadership teams.

Robert Dutt: In 2022, Westcap made a growth investment in WBM. Walk me through how you thought of that as a leadership team.

JoeAnne Hardy: We cast a wide net to see what opportunities were available. We had clear goals: Bob’s retirement, fueling acquisitions, and staying in control of the organization.

Before we started the process, we were rooted in what our goals were. That gives you a framework to evaluate everything from strategic takeovers to private equity. We chose Westcap because their value proposition was that they invest in management teams they believe in. They proved it through the process. My advice to other MSPs is to be rooted in what you’re trying to accomplish before you turn the page to looking at options.

Robert Dutt: Bell just announced a $1.7 billion AI data center outside Regina. Does that change the opportunity for WBM, and what does AI look like as a service line for you?

JoeAnne Hardy: AI has been part of our world for many years, so a news release about a data center isn’t the “turning point.” What’s different now is the rate of acceleration.

We’re excited because this is now a conversation in every boardroom. Every CIO has AI initiatives underway, and we’re helping them enable technology they likely already own but need to understand how to leverage.

Robert Dutt: You have a patent-pending Enterprise Experience Platform. How do you think about that kind of proprietary IP?

JoeAnne Hardy: It takes all the individual service items we offer and looks at them through the customer lens—the end-user experience.

If you have disconnected services, the end user feels it. Why doesn’t the service desk know I’m a new employee? Why is there no plan for my old device? The platform allows us to create a governance model built around making that experience seamless. The “end-user” isn’t just the person at the computer—it’s the IT department, the finance department, and the HR department.

Robert Dutt: Last question. If you could go back to the JoeAnne who was just starting as a sales assistant and tell her one thing about what this journey was going to look like, what would it be?

JoeAnne Hardy: I would say that everything that doesn’t work out is just as valuable as the things that do.

As a young woman starting out, I had a fear of making a mistake. But I reached a point where I realized the “butterflies” in my stomach were just the feeling I got before something awesome happened. Those mistakes are the growth moments. They’re way more valuable than the days everything goes exactly as planned.

Robert Dutt: “We win or we learn,” right?

JoeAnne Hardy: Yes, exactly.

Robert Dutt: JoeAnne, thank you so much for your time.

JoeAnne Hardy: Thanks, it was great to visit with you.

Robert Dutt: There you have it, JoeAnne Hardy from WBM Technologies.

I’d like to thank JoeAnne for her time—and for her candour. It’s not often you hear a company president talk openly about the moment they realized the business was winning but they were losing, and then walk you through exactly how they fixed it.

A few things I’m taking away from this one. First, the idea that growth should make your life better, not just your revenue bigger. Second, her framework for evaluating outside capital—know your non-negotiables before you start the conversation. And third, the way WBM thinks about the end-user experience as a platform.

If you’re enjoying the podcast, find us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and YouTube. Follow or subscribe so you don’t miss an episode. Until next time, I’m Robert Dutt for ChannelBuzz.ca, and I’ll see you in the channel.

TRANSCRIPT TO COME

Hello and welcome to In Case You Missed It from ChannelBuzz.ca, your weekly roundup where we pull the signal from the noise and bring you the stories that matter most to Canadian IT resellers and MSPs. I’m Robert Dutt, editor of ChannelBuzz.ca, and your host for the show.

And this one is a bit of a milestone, because it’s the last one – at least in this format. Starting Monday April 20th, In The Channel is launching The Buzz, a daily five-minute briefing every weekday morning with three things you need to know. Same editorial commitment, sharper cadence. More on that at the end.

But first, we’re going out on a full week of genuinely important news. Let’s get right into it.

Lead story this week has a hard deadline attached to it, so let’s not bury the lede.

Cisco is implementing list price adjustments on April 18th – that’s a week from this Saturday – and those adjustments are focused primarily on compute hardware. The reason, as WBM Technologies laid out in their April 2026 procurement update, is the ongoing volatility in the memory market and broader cost pressures hitting the global IT supply chain.

And Cisco is just one data point in a picture that WBM’s Director of Strategic Procurement, Ashley Schell, paints pretty vividly in their latest update. HPE saw a 24 to 30 percent increase in list prices in March alone. HP is raising prices by at least 10 percent on personal systems and Poly products, effective April 1st. Intel and AMD have both confirmed CPU price increases for OEMs. Fortinet is implementing monthly price increases averaging around 10 percent. Lenovo is warning that custom orders are being pushed out by 20 weeks or more on certain configurations. And Dell has cut quote validity to 14 days.

The driver, as we’ve been tracking all year, is AI data center demand consuming memory capacity at a scale that’s pulling supply away from traditional commercial and channel products. Industry forecasters are now talking about this continuing well into 2027, and the chairman of SK Group – one of the largest memory manufacturers in the world – said this week that the shortage could last until 2030.

WBM’s recommendation is clear: if you have upcoming technology requirements, evaluate opportunities to pull those purchases forward now. If you have Cisco compute quotes in flight, get them locked before April 18th. And take a hard look at the rest of your pipeline – the rolling increases across vendors are not slowing down.

Shifting gears – this week AWS dropped its most significant partner program update in years, and for MSPs in particular, it changes the financial equation.

For the first time, AWS is paying direct cash to partners for delivering managed services. Not credits, not MDF – cash. AWS VP of Partner Core Julia Chen told CRN that AWS data shows MSP-supported customers demonstrate 3.4x higher cloud spend, 58 percent better retention rates, and 5.1x customer growth. The message is: managed services creates better customer outcomes, and AWS is starting to reward that directly.

But the bigger structural shift underneath this is what AWS is calling Partner Revenue Measurement. It’s a resource tagging system where partners tag workloads inside customer environments – so AWS can track and credit the revenue associated with partner-delivered work, even when the AWS seller is the one who books the deal. Chen was direct about the timeline: by the end of 2026, all AWS programs will depend on this measurement system, and she’s asking partners to have it in use by July.

The full update includes eight major changes – but the other headline items are: a revamped Partner Central platform with agentic AI that AWS says can cut admin time by 30 to 40 percent, a new AI Assessment Fund to help partners fund the initial risk of AI proof-of-concept engagements, a new Greenfield Program for incentivizing net-new AWS customer acquisition, and an upgraded AI Competency framework based on real outcomes rather than just credentials.

For Canadian MSPs on the AWS path: the program is getting more generous. But it’s also getting more measurement-driven. If you want the cash, you need to tag your work.

Nutanix held its annual .NEXT conference in Chicago this week, and the headline announcement was what Nutanix is calling a complete platform for the agentic AI era.

The Nutanix Agentic AI solution – first teased at NVIDIA GTC back in March – is now in early access, with full general availability planned for the second half of this year. It’s a full-stack platform designed to let enterprises build and operate AI applications on Nutanix Cloud Platform, integrating compute, storage, networking, and Kubernetes across hybrid multicloud environments. The timing of Nutanix’s broader pitch is not accidental – “run anything, anywhere, on whatever hardware you’ve got” is a message that lands differently in a market where HPE list prices just went up 30 percent in a month and Cisco compute is about to get more expensive. The company is explicitly positioning itself as the flexible infrastructure alternative for customers simultaneously reassessing their VMware dependency and trying to navigate a constrained supply chain.

The partner ecosystem angle at .NEXT was notable too – this is the first year with more than 100 partners at the event, and Nutanix announced a significant expansion of its hardware ecosystem, adding or deepening integrations with Cisco, Dell, AMD, NetApp, and Lenovo.

And for some Canadian content: Toronto-based Arctiq took home the 2026 Americas Reseller Momentum Award at .NEXT, recognized for exceptional year-over-year sales growth, customer success, and expanded technical certifications across the Nutanix platform. Arctiq has had a busy year on the M&A front as well – they announced acquisitions of both Verinext and Shadow-Soft in recent months, building out their hybrid cloud, security, and observability capabilities. A Canadian partner winning a global award on a stage like this is always worth noting. Well done, Arctiq.

For our closer this week – a bit of perspective on the Canadian tech ecosystem.

Various trackers now put the count of Canadian tech unicorns – companies valued at a billion dollars or more – somewhere between 30 and 35 depending on your source. And when you look at that list, a couple of things stand out.

First, you’ll find companies we cover regularly in a channel context. 1Password is sitting at a $6.8 billion valuation. eSentire is on the same list. These are not scrappy newcomers – these are mature, established companies with deep enterprise footprints and real track records. The unicorn label sometimes makes everything sound like a startup story, but what this list actually tells you is that the Canadian cybersecurity sector in particular has been compounding quietly for a long time.

Second, it’s a useful reference point. The next time someone frames Canadian tech as a branch plant, or treats buying Canadian as a compromise – this list is your answer. Thirty-plus billion-dollar companies across security, fintech, SaaS, and infrastructure. Worth bookmarking.

And that’s a wrap – on this episode, and on the In Case You Missed It format.

I want to take a genuine moment to thank you for tuning in to ICYMI over its run. The goal was always the same: surface the stories that actually matter for Canadian IT resellers and MSPs, connect the dots across a noisy week of news, and give you something you could act on. I hope it’s done that.

Looking back at the arc of just the last few weeks – the Broadcom deadline forcing VMware decisions, the memory shortage turning into a full-scale supply chain crisis, agentic AI moving from vendor talking point to actual shipped product across Ingram Micro, AWS, Rewst, and now Nutanix – it’s been a genuinely consequential stretch of time for this industry. Lots to keep track of. That’s not slowing down.

Which is exactly why we’re evolving the format. Starting Monday April 20th, In The Channel is launching The Buzz – a daily five-minute briefing published every weekday morning at seven a.m. Eastern, covering three things Canadian IT solution providers need to know that day. Same editorial standards. Tighter format. Every morning.

I’d like to thank you for your support of In The Channel and ChannelBuzz.ca. You can find us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, and most podcast directories – and if the show has been useful to you, a rating or a review always helps more people find it.

Until next time, I’m Robert Dutt for ChannelBuzz.ca, and I’ll see you in the channel.

Robert Dutt: Hello and welcome to In The Channel from ChannelBuzz.ca, bringing news and information to the Canadian IT channel community for the last 16 years. I’m Robert Dutt, editor of ChannelBuzz.ca and your host for the show.

Tanium has been a name that most people in the IT space associate with large-scale enterprise endpoint management. Think hundreds of thousands of endpoints, federal government deployments, Fortune 500 environments. But the company has been making some moves in Canada that are worth paying attention to. They recently appointed a new country manager, unified their Canadian operations under a single national structure, and are talking openly about going after the mid-market, and doing it entirely through partners. On top of that, they’ve landed a significant Government of Canada win, they’ve achieved Protected B certification, and they’re expanding their footprint with boots on the ground from Calgary to Ottawa.

My guest today is Adam Ostopowich, the new country manager for Tanium Canada. And we’re going to talk about what this restructured approach means for Canadian solution providers, where the Canadian partner opportunities actually are, and how Tanium’s vision of autonomous IT fits into what’s happening in the Canadian market right now.

Let’s get right into it. My chat with Adam Ostopowich.

Adam, thanks for taking the time. I appreciate it.

Adam Ostopowich: Thanks a lot for having me, Rob. I’m really excited to be here.

Robert Dutt: So you’re just stepping into the role, heading up Tanium Canada. Tell us a little bit about the priorities in your new role, sort of where you’re investing your time and effort, particularly when it comes to partner-facing things.

Adam Ostopowich: Yeah, that’s a great question. So it’s an exciting time to be at Tanium. It’s also an exciting time to be Canadian. You know, with the way the market’s headed right now, there’s a ton of opportunity. Really, our vision is to help build a more secure, resilient, competitive nation by empowering organizations with real-time visibility, control, and autonomous IT capabilities to become unstoppable. Now, where this becomes critical in partnering is we really do need to work closely with our partners in order to strengthen the cybersecurity backbone of Canada. And it’s really about protecting Canadians and the companies that drive our economy. Partnering has never been more important in technology. It’s really about bringing platforms together, integrating multiple solutions together, and really, we need our partners to help drive that with us.

Robert Dutt: You guys recently rolled out a new unified national structure across Canada. Can you tell me a little bit about what that means in practice? What did the organization look like before, and what changes with this for a partner in, say, Calgary or Ottawa or Montreal or wherever?

Adam Ostopowich: So historically, Tanium’s definitely invested in the Canadian market, but it’s been in definitely a little bit more of a unique way. We didn’t have as many dedicated resources located in Canada. That’s really shifted over the last couple of years. And more recently, with February 1, the start of our fiscal year, we really had to make a strategic decision to bring all those resources together under one umbrella and continue to invest in having dedicated resources on the ground supporting our customers, but also interfacing with folks like product marketing, customer success, and so on, across the board. Partnering also became extremely important with the strategy. In the past, we had multiple partner managers focused on different market segments of our business. Now we have one channel manager focused across the board on every market segment, and that’s so important for Canada, especially as a lot of the partners we work with, they cross all market segments. It’s very rare that you’ll come across a partner that’s just focused in one place. So having that unified approach, especially in the channel, has never been more important in Canada.

Robert Dutt: So they were previously focused vertically or geographically, how was that?

Adam Ostopowich: So primarily focused on – Tanium segments the market based on endpoint potential, and so it was based on the bands of endpoints that our customers would be. So that could be commercial, it could be mid-market, it could be enterprise, and then of course we’ve got our public sector and federal business as well. So now we’re pulling that all together and saying, “Hey, we need to go to market in a more unified way, and we need to pull in our customer success stories, make sure that our partners are aware of every stream of business that we do,” because a lot of that crosses into multiple organizations across the board.

Robert Dutt: The EVAS win with the Government of Canada, obviously pretty significant for you guys. What does the partner ecosystem around that look like? Is there room for solution providers beyond Computacenter, who’s kind of the go-to partner there?

Adam Ostopowich: Yeah, so we’re definitely partnered closely with Computacenter Canada. There’s potential opportunities across the board. I mean, ultimately, we’re servicing the Government of Canada, but there’s also the contracting in place with Shared Services Canada that’s ultimately going to be touching any organization that buys through that mechanism. So there’s a good chance that many of those organizations will already work with other partners that potentially are already working with Tanium, or there’s an opportunity to expand our partnerships in those spaces. But for the most part, right now we’re heavily invested in Computacenter and how we’re supporting that contract across the board.

Robert Dutt: Historically, Tanium has been an enterprise and government play. With the mid-market now under the same national umbrella and building sort of across those bands, as you describe, in endpoints, are you actively trying to reach a different class, a different size of customer in Canada than you were in the past?

Adam Ostopowich: Yeah, absolutely. Tanium’s roots are absolutely in the large enterprise space, and we define that as hundreds of thousands to millions of endpoints. Now, Tanium was built to handle the most complex environments in the world. However, what we’re learning very quickly is there’s a massive opportunity down market as well to use the same technology in a rapid way. And really, it’s never been more important as we think about autonomous IT and AI. Ultimately, Tanium’s platform is best positioned to deliver data in real time. And that’s where going into the mid-market space really does help strengthen our growth strategy across Canada.

Robert Dutt: As you look at that mid-market and even below kind of level in terms of customer size, how does that change in terms of go-to-market, who you’re working with on the partner side? Basically, what does the channel look like for that space?

Adam Ostopowich: Yeah, so right now we work with a multitude of channel partners. Everything from your SIs to your technical partners like Microsoft and ServiceNow that we’re deeply embedded with. But there’s also a lot of VARs and MSPs that we work with as well. And ultimately, especially in the mid-market, we’re often working with more boutique service partners that help us to get into existing customers they’re already with or help us to service customers that we already have in a better way. So that’s a more localized and near experience for them.

Robert Dutt: For somewhat obvious reasons, data sovereignty is a huge issue in Canada right now. How much is that driving the conversations that you’re having with customers and how does that translate into partner-led opportunity?

Adam Ostopowich: Yeah, so data sovereignty has never been more important. It’s definitely been important over the last decade, but it’s absolutely critical now. I’ll call it a core requirement rather than an optional requirement. And so with that being said, in all of our conversations, it’s kind of set up as it’s almost assumed that that is the way it is. In the conversations, absolutely, we need to position it in a way that Tanium has all the architecture and the delivery of the solution in Canada. And that even goes as deep as our AI modeling. All of that is regional model availability. And our product team is deeply focused on making sure that all of our customers in the region have all the data sovereignty requirements in place. Even when we think about the Government of Canada, we needed to obtain Protected B status to really make sure we align to the criticality of that.

Robert Dutt: Is that a structure that’s been in place for a while now, or is that something that’s kind of come together with the Shared Services and the Government of Canada wins?

Adam Ostopowich: Yeah, so it’s two separate things. The Protected B is dedicated for the Government of Canada, and that’s their own environment. With the rest of the Canadian regional environment, that’s been around for quite a while. I don’t have the exact timing on that, but when I joined Tanium, that was one of the first questions I asked in the interview process. I’m like, “Do we have all of our environments in Canada?” Because I know how critical that is, and it’s absolutely a bare minimum requirement for us to be successful in the market.

Robert Dutt: At last year’s Converge event, you shifted the messaging and the overall structure from autonomous endpoint management to autonomous IT. What does that actually mean for partners? Does it change how they sell, what they sell, who they sell to?

Adam Ostopowich: Yeah, so fundamentally, autonomous endpoint management is still a core solution. It’s absolutely part of the DNA of it. Where the message change came from at Converge is really around broadening the scope of what autonomous IT means and connecting it into various enterprise layers. So we can think about our partnership with ServiceNow as an example, or we can think about our partnership with Microsoft. It’s really about how we tie that whole ecosystem together and make sure that our customers can operate in an autonomous way. So with that, really the platform as a whole is really about managing and securing endpoints through a single unified platform driven by AI as real-time endpoint intelligence. And autonomous IT as a whole is bringing that outside of just the Tanium platform as well. So it’s extending it to things like mobile device management, extending it to other enterprise platforms as well that can really help our customers truly become autonomous in the modern day and age.

Robert Dutt: That’s, I guess, four or five months ago now that rolled out at Converge. How has traction gone in getting that out to Canadian partners and getting them to understand the vision, the direction, and where things are going?

Adam Ostopowich: Yeah, candidly, it’s gone way better than I think many of us expected. It uniquely aligns to everything that’s happening in the market right now where it’s never been more important for customers and organizations to really think about how do they create a more scalable, sustainable business through automation. And ultimately, it really does help our partners to bring that strategy into their visions with their customers that are asking for us to solve these complex business outcome-related solutions. And so with autonomous IT, there’s a number of ways that it ties in. For example, if we think about partnering with ServiceNow, there’s several service companies that manage the entire ServiceNow footprint for a customer. So autonomous IT nicely fits into that channel model there where we’re now augmenting the data that gets delivered to ServiceNow. It’s helping all their downstream workflows. And in several cases, it’s literally automating a help desk ticket process where something as simple as, “Hey, my laptop’s slowing down.” An employee can submit a ticket. Through ServiceNow, it can push or request Tanium to pull all the endpoint data. Then the AI model can run against that, and then it can push the action back to the end device without human interaction. And of course, there’s always going to be the controls in place to manage this, so that we can make sure that it’s effective and not doing anything haywire.

Robert Dutt: The big event of summer 2024 kind of brought to light platform concentration as a risk. I’m curious if you hear that kind of idea in conversations from Canadian customers in terms of wanting to stay away from that kind of platform concentration.

Adam Ostopowich: Yeah. So we’re actually seeing a trend more towards platform at the moment. And I think it depends on how the platform is defined. For Tanium, the important thing is we’re often connecting into existing data sources. We’re not like a large store of data, for example. So we’re tapping into existing data that’s already there, and we’re able to grab it in real time and deliver it to where it needs to be. And so with that, there’s already backups in place, so to speak, where the platform itself isn’t like a one-stop shop, if that makes sense. So with that, we’re actually seeing a lot of customers wanting to consolidate a lot of their tooling and leverage a platform to help rationalize IT spend, increase efficiency, be able to increase automation and leverage multiple data sources to feed AI.

Robert Dutt: You’re currently hiring a director of strategic accounts in Calgary. What’s the western Canada play for you right now? What does that look like today and where do you see that going?

Adam Ostopowich: So yeah, we’re actively hiring somebody in Calgary, and it’s really to focus on new customer acquisition. And I’ve been interviewing constantly for that role, as you can imagine. So the biggest topic actually that will be interesting for here is we’re always assessing, how are they plugged into the channel? How are they working with the ecosystem today? Because ultimately, that’s what’s going to drive our success in western Canada. We’ve already got a number of directors of strategic accounts, or DSAs as we call them, in the western Canada market. This is really a new business development role to continue to grow in the region.

Robert Dutt: You mentioned earlier you’re working with the big SIs, you’re also working with VARs and MSPs. Particularly in that mid-size solution provider space, the VAR and the MSP, what’s the profile there that works? What are some common threads that make for a good Tanium partner?

Adam Ostopowich: I think it spans a couple of different layers, depending on what the partner really specializes in. Like, for example, if the partner specializes in Microsoft, then we absolutely go in hand in hand with that whole story and how we integrate the whole stack together. There’s other situations where a partner might be focused more on a dedicated area, like patching, for example. Ultimately, the profile of the partner itself can definitely vary, but it really comes down to ensuring that they’re aligned with what autonomous IT is capable of, whether it’s use cases around patching, real-time asset visibility, or it could also be about vulnerability management and things like that.

Robert Dutt: What’s your biggest untapped or under-realized opportunity in the Canadian market right now, and what can partners do to get access to that, to get into it?

Adam Ostopowich: That’s a great question, and it’s absolutely mid-market. That’s an area where we’re really leaning in with partners to have them obtain the sales certifications, obtain the ability to do demos, obtain the ability to do proof of concepts or proof of values, because we really see that as an untapped opportunity where a lot of partners are already deeply embedded into these customers. And ultimately, mid-market organizations are really looking to get to that next level of autonomous IT.

Robert Dutt: What’s the philosophy for building the channel for that mid-market space? On a continuum between sign up a bunch of new partners and get the folks that you’re already working with more active in that space, where between those two extremes do you fall right now?

Adam Ostopowich: Right now we’re doubling down on the partners that we already have. That’s absolutely critical. We’re already starting to see a lot of traction, and it’s growing there. Also, with our partner manager that’s dedicated now for Canada, he’s really building out that strategy as to who are the right people, how do we ensure that we’re going to market together in an effective way, ensuring that we’re not spreading ourselves too thin, and that we’re really building out that ecosystem that can help to marry together what we’re both trying to accomplish for our organizations.

Robert Dutt: A couple of quick lightning round type questions to wrap up here. First of all, what’s one misconception or misunderstanding you think partners may have about Tanium today?

Adam Ostopowich: I think overall the misconception is where we play best. Ultimately, Tanium has for whatever reason been known in some cases as being like an EDR solution, for example. I hear that occasionally, and I’m like, interesting. So Tanium is not an EDR. That’s not an area that we’re trying to play in at all. We’re actually trying to augment EDR solutions and even help to deploy them and make sure that they’re governed in a proper way. So overall, for channel, it’s really about understanding what the platform is fundamentally. It’s really about being able to provide visibility across an enterprise. So whether that’s finding servers that maybe an enterprise didn’t know about or end user workstations that were unknown, it’s very common for us to do proof of concepts and find anywhere from 10% to 25% more endpoints than a company even knew they had. And so they might think that they’re fully protected, but then they realize very quickly that they were, but they didn’t know about all the other devices. Like maybe a server got spun up because it was there for a proof of concept or a point of view, and then it never got updates and patches and things like that. All it takes is for that to get plugged in and you become vulnerable. So Tanium really helps to provide that widespread visibility. And it’s also about being able to manage the endpoints, so seeing but also acting on them. And then being able to handle things like zero-day events, for example, things that get missed by an EDR. A major issue just got released that nobody knew about. Well, now Tanium can be used as that last line of defense to really go in and contain it, remediate it, find the blast radius, what the impact was of it.

Robert Dutt: And finally, fill in the blank for me. Two years from now, Tanium in Canada will be…

Adam Ostopowich: Yeah, so two years from now, Tanium in Canada absolutely will double in size. We’re extremely focused on the market right now. We’ve got a very clear plan on how we’re going to grow and it’s 100% partner-driven. That’s absolutely an area that we’re going to focus on. And so we really invite conversations with partners. We really want to have those conversations to help deepen the relationships we have, but also expand into other areas that potentially we haven’t thought of yet.

Robert Dutt: That’s a great place to leave it at, I think. That’s an admirable goal and good luck in reaching that, both in the customer base and in the channel. Adam, thanks so much for taking the time.

Adam Ostopowich: Thanks a lot, Robert.

Robert Dutt:

There you have it, Adam Ostopowich from Tanium Canada.

I’d like to thank Adam for his time, especially as someone stepping into a new leadership role. First podcast, as he mentioned, and he handled it well.

A couple of things that stood out for me in the conversation. First, the mid-market piece. When a vendor that’s been known for managing millions of endpoints says the mid-market is their biggest untapped opportunity in Canada and that they want to get there through partners, that’s worth hearing. Whether you’re a VAR already embedded with mid-sized customers or an MSP looking at where the next practice area comes from, that’s worth the conversation.

Second, the data sovereignty angle. Adam described it as a core requirement rather than an optional one, and the fact that Tanium’s entire architecture, including their AI modeling, runs regionally in Canada is relevant context in the current environment.

And third, I appreciate the honest correction on the EDR misconception. Tanium doesn’t compete with your EDR, they augment it. That changes the math on how a partner might position this in their stack. The goal of doubling the Canadian footprint in two years, 100% partner-driven, is ambitious. We’ll see how it plays out.

Please be sure to follow or subscribe in the podcast app of your choice. We’re on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, and most other major directories. And if you have a moment to leave a rating or review, it helps more than you’d think.

Until next time, I’m Robert Dutt for ChannelBuzz.ca, and I’ll see you in the channel.

TRANSCRIPT TO COME

Robert Dutt: Hello and welcome to In The Channel from ChannelBuzz.ca, bringing news and information to the Canadian IT channel community for the last sixteen years. I’m Robert Dutt, editor of ChannelBuzz.ca, and your host for the show.

My guest today is Gareth Pettigrew. Gareth spent years leading partner communications at Cisco and most recently at Okta, and he’s now launched his own consultancy, Pettigrew Communications, offering fractional comms leadership to companies across the channel. I’ve known Gareth for a long time, and what’s always stood out to me is that he genuinely understands the partner business – not just the vendor talking points, but how partners actually operate and communicate day to day.

I’ve wanted to do an episode on communications and PR for partners for a while now, but I kept bumping into the same problem: I couldn’t crack the “why should a 15-person MSP care about this” question in a way I thought would actually land. And then I talked to Gareth, and he cracked it in about 30 seconds. We’re going to get into why communications matters more right now than it ever has, why it doesn’t have to be the heavy lift you think it is, and Gareth’s going to give you a practical, week-by-week roadmap for getting started – even if you have zero budget and zero comms experience.

This is also the first in what we’re planning as a series. Gareth and I are going to go deeper on specific threads in future episodes – things like crisis communications, LinkedIn thought leadership, working with your vendor’s PR team – so think of this one as the foundation.

Let’s get right into it, my chat with Gareth Pettigrew.

Robert Dutt: Hello and welcome to In The Channel from ChannelBuzz.ca, bringing news and information to the Canadian IT channel community for the last 16 years. I’m Robert Dutt, editor of ChannelBuzz.ca, and your host for the show.

Here’s a question I think about a lot. What does it actually mean when a global tech vendor says they’re investing in Canada? Because there’s a spectrum, right? On one end, you’ve got a vendor that sells into Canada from a US office, maybe sends someone up to a conference once a year. On the other end, you’ve got real infrastructure, real headcount, real commitment to treating Canada as a market with its own needs and its own opportunities. Somewhere in the middle is where most vendors actually land.

Today I’m talking to Ryan Sydor, the head of Okta Canada. Okta’s been making some pretty significant moves here over the past year or so. They launched a Canadian data cell, they’ve redesigned their Toronto office, and they’ve now got over 600 employees in the country. If you caught our recent conversation with Okta’s Jack Hirsch about shadow AI and non-human identity, think of this as the companion piece. That was the global product story. This is the Canadian market story – what Okta’s building here and what it means for partners.

Let’s get into it. My chat with Ryan Sydor.

Robert Dutt: Ryan, thanks for taking the time.

Ryan Sydor: Good to see you again, Robert.

Robert Dutt: You’re in this role heading Canada at a pivotal moment. New office, new data cell in Canada, new channel chief on the global level. When you look at the Canadian market for identity, what’s the picture that you walked into and what’s the mandate that you’ve been given for the Canadian organization?

Ryan Sydor: Well, the market obviously has changed, and there’s been a focus in the last six months that has been dominating every conversation. It’s AI. Every conversation we have with a customer or prospect is around AI. There’s a curiosity around it, there’s an urgency, there is uncertainty. Everyone’s trying to figure out how do we use AI to improve our business and at the same time, protect our business and ensure that we’re safe. It’s this balance of the need for cybersecurity, the need to protect your organization. Cybersecurity attacks have increased 200 percent year over year, and it was on a high baseline as it was.

Customers are really focused on how do we stay safe and keep our company and our brand safe. At the same time, AI has changed the way we think about running a business in ways I’m not sure companies fully understand yet. How do we leverage innovation to stay ahead of our competition? The opportunity where you can vault ahead, you can really differentiate, create new business streams, create new efficiencies, and do it at the same time that you’re secure.

The mandate that we have is not just a Canadian mandate. The mandate is how do we help our customers along that journey, and how do we do it quickly? Because this is all happening fast. It’s an unpaved road in some respects. No one really knows exactly how it’s going to play out, but we understand the value and the benefit and the risks that come with it. We feel at Okta that we’re really well positioned to help our customers, partner with them, and help keep them safe while still allowing them to be innovative.

From a Canadian perspective, our goal is how do we partner with our customers and with Canadian businesses, help paint that picture, sit with them on the same side of the table, and put together our plans so that they can innovate and be safe. And from a channel partner perspective, one of the major pillars that we have as an organization this year is to partner. We’re focused on AI, we’re focused on a better methodology of how we approach our customers, and then it’s about being a partner-first organization. What I’ve seen with our new SVP is a stronger alignment with our partners, making sure that these conversations that we’re having, we’re having together. A lot of this is about relationships, it’s about comfort, it’s about trust, and who better to work with than our partner network.

Robert Dutt: Sticking with the theme of the Canadian investment, when Okta looks at Canada as a market, are we at the “we need a flag planted here” level, or is there something structurally different about the Canadian opportunity that’s driving the investment at this point?

Ryan Sydor: I think it is AI, and it’s our need to partner with organizations. I think it’s also the opportunity that Okta sees. When we invest in the data cell, it opens up the market to companies that we haven’t been able to sell to in the past. The regulated industries, local governments, provincial governments, federal governments. That presents a great opportunity for us as an organization, and it’s a need for these different levels of government. There are regulations that have come out, C-8 and the need to be more focused on cybersecurity. We as the trusted identity company are a good fit at this time with those organizations.

Robert Dutt: You touched on the data cell that went live this quarter. For partners and customers who aren’t themselves deep in the identity space, can you explain what that actually is and what it means in practice? What changes for a customer on day one of being on the Canadian cell versus where they were before?

Ryan Sydor: It means the data is hosted in Canada. The data cell is in Montreal. We have a failsafe in Calgary. So it means that those companies that need to have their data in Canada, managed by Canadians, now have the opportunity to do so.

Robert Dutt: You touched on how that unlocks government and other areas. Can you explain what are the verticals and what types of deals weren’t on the table before but are now?

Ryan Sydor: There’s two kinds. First of all, there’s the federal government. There were RFPs that came through that we couldn’t even bid on, because without data residency, you’re not eligible to bid. So it does open up that opportunity. Then there are companies who are making decisions on where they want their data. It’s a decision around regulation, but also it’s a costing question. It’s about what their customers are comfortable with. There have been customers in the past who have asked to be on the EU cell or have chosen to go with other options. Now they have the opportunity to work with Okta with our workforce product and have their data hosted in Canada.

Robert Dutt: A few years ago, you were running about 70% of Canadian revenue through partners with a pretty small direct team. Is that still the ratio today, or how has that shifted?

Ryan Sydor: The number has increased. I think that number is over 80% from last year. Our direct team has grown a little bit, but the partnership is meant to help really scale the business. I’ll give you an example of how we’ve prioritized partners to help us grow. We actually invested to have partners join us at our sales kickoff this year, where we went through a new sales methodology, and we wanted our partners to be with us so that we could sell together. It wasn’t all our partners, it was a select group of partners. But it was the company demonstrating that as a partner-first organization, we’re now eliminating the silos. We understand the same language, we think about the business the same way, and we think that’s going to be beneficial to our partners, to our customers, and obviously to Okta as well.

Robert Dutt: Expanding on that, with Laura Padilla coming in as channel chief globally, she’s talked about doubling down on partners in every geography and driving more toward partner-led markets. From what you’re saying, it sounds like Canada is firmly in that space. What does that mean practically for an MSP or a VAR who’s working with you or potentially working with you?

Ryan Sydor: What I hope it means is, one, as we continue to focus on being partner-first, it means that we should be speaking earlier. That’s the first thing we’re trying to do, make sure we’re aligned earlier. We’re investing in programs and processes to make sure that we’re talking to our VARs, that we understand who the relationships are, and make sure we leverage them. And doing that on a consistent basis where we build trust not only with the customer, but between the partners and Okta. We think this is so important because the customers are talking about AI. As I mentioned, there’s uncertainty, and they’re looking for their trusted partners to help advise them. So the more we’re aligned, the more we have people who are trusted, who have solutions and opinions that can support the customer base, it’s beneficial for all parties.

Robert Dutt: Okta’s own data says that something like 93% of Canadian businesses are using AI agents, but a very small percentage, maybe 1%, have a strategy for managing non-human identities. I recently talked to Jack Hirsch, who heads up product for you, about the shadow AI problem from the product side. From where you’re sitting looking at the Canadian business, what are you hearing from customers about this? Is the awareness there, or are people still in the “that’s a tomorrow problem” or “that’s somebody else’s problem” phase?

Ryan Sydor: No, I heard the interview with Jack, and I heard your comment about unintended consequences. I think that is the message that we’re hearing from senior-level CISOs and IT leaders at our customers. They understand the need for governance. They understand the need for control. Again, it’s this balance that our customers are facing: how do you go fast, but how do you do it in a safe way? They recognize that it’s an important thing and it’s not something to be overlooked. AI agents become the new attack front, the new point of entry for bad actors. That’s why we’re having as many conversations as we are right now, because everyone is trying to figure it out and trying to figure out what great looks like.

Robert Dutt: When you’re having that conversation, where do you see partners fitting in? Is it something partners can lead on, or is it something Okta takes the lead on and partners follow?

Ryan Sydor: In most cases, it’s the partner relationship that helps us get to the conversation. And then it is generally an Okta-led conversation. We have a dedicated team that will have those conversations with the customers. What we’re trying to do is figure out what our customers are doing, what is the plan, what’s in place, what initiatives are coming up, how do we align, where are the governance controls that we can help with. But it’s a conversation that comes from the Okta side.

Robert Dutt: The federal government has been signaling hard on digital sovereignty. There’s talk of a billion-dollar sovereign cloud investment, procurement requirements are tightening. Is that creating tailwind for you, or is it more complicated than that?

Ryan Sydor: Having our own data cell has certainly made it very important. The conversation around data in Canada is becoming, especially for government and these regulated industries, really important. But I think possibly in time you may see more companies who are not required to have their data held in Canada choose to do so.

Robert Dutt: French language support also came alongside the data cell launch. How important is that in the Quebec market, and can you talk about how that fits into the Canadian strategy and opens up your partner plays in la belle province?

Ryan Sydor: I’ll go back to government opportunities in Quebec. If you don’t have French language capabilities, you can’t bid on many of these contracts and RFPs. So what it’s doing is obviously an investment and a commitment in supporting all of Canada, and it opens up a door for us to focus on helping a very big opportunity. In many of those cases, the relationships with partners are how we have those conversations. Partners who are dealing with the government of Quebec now have the opportunity to work with Okta.

Robert Dutt: Just a couple of lightning round quick answers before we wrap up. What’s the biggest misconception you hear from Canadian partners about the identity market right now?

Ryan Sydor: I’m not sure I’d call it a misconception. I think it’s perhaps understanding where Okta fits with AI, as everything is happening so fast. But we’ve invested a lot of money in training, not only our partners in our sales methodology, but training them in how Okta supports customers with AI. So I wouldn’t say there’s a misconception. I think there’s an alignment to ensure that we’re having the conversations that our customers want to have.

Robert Dutt: What’s one thing that you wish every MSP in Canada would start doing tomorrow?

Ryan Sydor: I think every MSP in Canada should be having conversations with their customers about AI, trying to understand what the strategy is, understand where the challenges are, and having Okta join them to help with those conversations.

Robert Dutt: What’s the most underrated vertical opportunity in Canada for you right now?

Ryan Sydor: I think we have opportunity in lots of verticals. Financial services – I’d almost say underrated, but I think where we want to spend a lot of time, we’re seeing a lot of traction. We see a lot of traction in technology. And clearly we talked about government. I think there is a tremendous opportunity in the public sector – underrated in how things have operated up to this point, but creates the greatest opportunity for us moving forward.

Robert Dutt: And finally, fill in the blank for me. In two years, Okta Canada will be…

Ryan Sydor: Triple in size.

Robert Dutt: That’s a good place for you to be, and that’s a great place for partners, I think. Ryan, I appreciate your taking the time. It’s been an interesting conversation, and good luck reaching that triple-the-size number.

Ryan Sydor: Thank you. Appreciate it.

Robert Dutt: There you have it – Ryan Sydor from Okta Canada.

I’d like to thank Ryan for his time, and thank you for listening.

So here’s what I’d take away from this one. Okta is running over 80% of Canadian revenue through partners now, up from around 70% a couple of years ago, and they’re backing that up with real investment – 600-plus employees, a Montreal-based data cell with a Calgary failsafe that unlocks regulated verticals like government and healthcare, and they’re bringing partners to their own sales kickoff to learn the same methodology their sellers use. Ryan says he wants to triple the Canadian business in two years. That’s ambitious, but the pieces are being put in place.

For partners, the bigger signal here is that identity is becoming a practice area you can’t afford to ignore. Between data sovereignty, AI governance, and the explosion of non-human identities, this is where real services revenue is going to be built. Keep an eye on it.

If you’re enjoying the ChannelBuzz.ca podcast, do me a favour and hit follow or subscribe wherever you’re listening. We’re on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, and most major directories. And if you’ve got a minute to leave a rating or a review, that goes a long way in helping other people in the community find us.

Until next time, I’m Robert Dutt for ChannelBuzz.ca, and I’ll see you in the channel.

Hello and welcome to In Case You Missed It from ChannelBuzz.ca. I’m Robert Dutt, editor of ChannelBuzz.ca, and this is your weekly look at the stories that matter for the Canadian IT channel community. April 6th, 2026.

Four stories this week. SonicWall reframes what security actually means for SMBs. Cisco hits partners in the deal reg. Lenovo bets on services. And some sobering Canadian numbers on the state of cybersecurity.

Let’s get into it.

SonicWall released its 2026 Cyber Protect Report this week, and the headline is a reframe worth understanding: most SMBs aren’t losing ground to sophisticated attacks. They’re losing ground to seven predictable, preventable failures that SonicWall has named the Seven Deadly Sins of Cybersecurity.

Those seven sins: ignoring the fundamentals like authentication and patching; operating with false confidence about your risk level; overexposed access with flat networks and implicit trust; a reactive security posture rather than proactive monitoring; cost-driven security decisions that defer investment until after a breach arrives; reliance on legacy access models like VPNs that authenticate once and trust everything thereafter; and chasing hype over execution — buying tools without actually deploying them properly.

The supporting data is striking. SMBs see ransomware involvement in 88% of their breaches, more than double the rate at large enterprises. Identity, cloud, and credential compromise account for 85% of actionable security alerts. The average breach goes undetected for 181 days. The stolen password, not the zero-day, is the attacker’s weapon of choice.

The quote from Michael Crean, their vice president of Managed Services,  captures it best: “The danger isn’t that AI isn’t working; it’s that we’re using it as an excuse not to do the things we already know we should.”

We’ll go deeper on this with Crean in an upcoming In The Channel episode. Watch for that in the coming weeks.

Now for something that hits closer to home — specifically, closer to the margin line.

Cisco has eliminated compute deal registration, effective immediately. No more deal reg on compute products, no more associated promotional discounts. The driver, per Cisco, is rising memory costs — the same hardware squeeze we’ve been tracking for weeks.

Channel reaction has been blunt. Partners are calling the move out of character for Cisco and warning of lost margins. CRN’s coverage makes clear this is not a minor adjustment — it’s a structural change to how Cisco compute goes to market through the channel.

This is the latest domino in the RAMmageddon effect. Memory prices surge, vendors absorb what they can, and eventually the cost lands on partners and customers. Intel and AMD both raised prices last week. Cisco just removed the cushion that was softening the impact for partners.

Lenovo’s answer to the same hardware headwind looks quite different. They’ve announced updates to the Lenovo 360 partner framework, with the headline being a new Lenovo 360 for Services pathway launching April 13th.

The pitch is straightforward: structured resources and incentives to move partners from transactional hardware deals toward managed and professional services. Given everything we just said about margin compression, that direction makes sense.

New additions include a Lenovo 360 Tech Connect technical community and an upgraded partner portal. Not flashy, but this is exactly the kind of structural investment that matters when hardware economics are working against you.

ChannelDive’s framing is the honest one: Lenovo is boosting its partner program as a PC sales slowdown looms. If you can’t win on hardware margin right now, services is where the conversation needs to go.

We’ll close with some Canadian numbers worth paying attention to.

CDW Canada, working with IDC Canada, surveyed more than 700 Canadian security leaders for the 2026 Canadian Cybersecurity Study released this week. The headline: cyberattacks targeting Canadian enterprises surged nearly 80% year-over-year. Enterprise cloud infection rates hit a record high of 53%, up from 41% the prior year.

The report calls this a maturity paradox — organizations are investing in security architecture, but breach success rates are climbing anyway. It’s Canadian-specific data, which makes it more immediately applicable than most global threat reports for conversations with clients here at home.

That’s your In Case You Missed It for April 6th, 2026. Links to everything we covered are in the show notes at ChannelBuzz.ca.

If you’re finding this useful, subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you listen. Ratings and reviews always help.

I’m Robert Dutt for ChannelBuzz.ca. Have a great week, and I’ll see you in the channel.

Robert Dutt: Hello and welcome to In The Channel from ChannelBuzz.ca, bringing news and information to the Canadian IT channel community for the last 16 years. I’m Robert Dutt, editor of ChannelBuzz.ca and your host for the show.

If I say the name Fortra, there’s a decent chance you might not immediately place it. But if I say Cobalt Strike, or Digital Guardian, or Alert Logic, or Titus, especially if you’re in Ottawa, those might ring a bell.

Fortra is the company that’s been quietly acquiring cybersecurity companies for the better part of a decade. More than 20 acquisitions in all, and now they’re trying to stitch it all together into a unified platform, pointed squarely at MSPs and MSSPs.

What makes this story interesting right now is they’ve recently made some moves that signal where they think they fit into the ecosystem. They sold off their Alert Logic managed services business to LevelBlue, which is a pretty clear statement. We make software, we’re not going to compete with you on service delivery. And they’ve rolled out a new partner program called Fortra Protect with guaranteed margins and a single partner agreement that covers the whole portfolio.

My guest today is Faraz Siraj, Fortra’s Vice President of Global Channels and Alliances, and I wanted to talk to you about what it looks like to build a channel program around a platform that was assembled through acquisition, how MSPs should think about the balance between offensive and defensive security capabilities, and whether there’s a Canadian go-to-market story here.

Let’s get right into it. My chat with Faraz Siraj.

Faraz, thanks for taking the time. I appreciate it.

Faraz Siraj: Great to be here.

Robert Dutt: Fortra has been built through a bunch of acquisitions. 20+, 25+ I think? For MSPs who know Cobalt Strike or Digital Guardian but don’t necessarily know the umbrella brand of Fortra, what’s the pitch for why they should think of you guys as a platform rather than sort of a collection of tools?

Faraz Siraj: Great question. Well, all of these products that we acquired over a, I’d say, a five-year period, it was around a little over 20 companies, we are going to platformization, and all of these will be available via the platform. And the platform provides a variety of tools to manage, and so MSPs would probably want to welcome that opportunity to utilize a single platform with multi-tenancy to help manage those solutions for their customers. It’s just a natural fit, and rather than having multi-screens, multiple interfaces to be able to provide those types of managed services, so it’s a very, very powerful way of bringing it all together.

Robert Dutt: For that MSP market, you guys sold off Alert Logic’s managed services business to LevelBlue a couple of months ago. What does that signal to MSPs about where you see Fortra sitting in the ecosystem moving forward, in terms of trying to be a technology brand behind the MSP?

Faraz Siraj: Well, that’s a perfect fit. I think we realized that the managed service business is not really what our strong suit is. And we aligned our Alert Logic business with a suitor that can take full advantage of that kind of business, and they’re very good at it. We, over time, realized that if you want to do that business, you have to really focus in on it, whereas we had other priorities.

And so what that tells the market and other partners out there is that we need our partners to be able to provide those managed solutions. We truly are in the business of making and providing software. We do not want to be in the services game. We want to have our partners provide those services, whether it is managed services or whether it’s installation services, optimization services delivery, we need our partners to do that.

And that’s what creates opportunity. And that’s what I’m really excited about with our platform play, as well as where our future direction is as a company around the products that we provide.

Robert Dutt: One of the most interesting things I think you guys talk about is the idea of MSPs balancing offense and defense. And I guess I want to dig into what that actually looks like in terms of the service delivery level. Where does offensive insight realistically show up in the day-to-day stack for an MSP?

Faraz Siraj: Well, it shows up everywhere, whether you realize or not. It is in whether it is vulnerability management, it’s in offensive security tooling, it is in pen testing, it is in simulations. That takes some knowledge and ability to provide those services around those capabilities. And that’s just from an offensive side. There is a need for support for those particular product sets. On the defensive side, it’s pretty simple. I mean, we have a lot of those defensive protection products, and we need our partners to be able to provide solutions around it.

Robert Dutt: Yeah, and MSPs, most I would dare say at this point, are defensive operators by nature. Prevent, detect, respond, deal with the problem. What can MSPs realistically do with offensive capabilities, and where should they not be trying to operationalize offensive capabilities in their stack?

Faraz Siraj: Well, the first thing that I would tell them is be comfortable with what you’re providing. Be comfortable with your capabilities that you can go to your market with, with your customers. If you don’t know it, you can certainly learn, but you don’t want to try to pigeonhole yourself into a technology that you’re unfamiliar with.

We can help with that. We have a lot of training. We have a lot of classes available through our Fortra Academy that can help them, and we have onboarding that we can help partners with. Again, it would be, I would think about the customer and work backwards. You would want to qualify the customer and qualify their needs. And if offensive security is something that is a pain point for your customer, then investigate it. And sometimes it’s not. And if it’s not needed, why would you want to venture and invest in an area that you’re unfamiliar with? Now I’d love for all of them to do it, but I’m an honest person. Sometimes it doesn’t make the right business sense.

Robert Dutt: You guys acquired Red Macros Factory to enhance Outflank Security Tooling. Cobalt Strike is used by red teams worldwide, but it’s also used by threat actors who are probably using cracked copies. That led Fortra and Microsoft to take joint legal action in the past. How do you talk to partners about selling offensive tools when some of those tools have been weaponized against their customers?

Faraz Siraj: It’s a discussion point. It’s also sort of a proof of concept in a twisted sort of way. Well, we do not support any illegal use of our products. We do not support using it for the wrong reasons, so to speak. We have strict legal language on it and we have gone to legal with Microsoft about those kinds of things, because we have strict requirements of how you’re going to utilize this tool.

If we find out that you’re using it for the wrong reasons, weaponization, we cut it off. And that’s part of the qualification. And that’s also part of the execution and inspection that we look at. These are very powerful tools and they are not for that purpose.

And just as another example is when we provide NFR gear, it’s meant for testing purposes and lab gear. You cannot be utilizing it to provide protection from as a customer standpoint, even though it’s not the same completely. It’s similar. And we just, we have to be very transparent and upfront about what these tools are about and how they’re supposed to be used.

Robert Dutt: Let’s talk about the program and what you guys are doing there. You’ve introduced guaranteed margins with Fortra Protect and the FortraOne agreement. What problem were you specifically trying to solve with that model and what was sort of the problem with how partners were engaging with Fortra before?

Faraz Siraj: Yeah, there’s several problems that we were addressing and yet we came to an innovative way on how to address it. So let’s look at a little history. When you acquire so many companies, your discount structure is all over the place. In Fortra transparency, we had discounts that were in the low 20s and going way north into the higher discounts.

And when partners want to work with you, they expect a certain discount table for all products. And when you’re all over the map, you can’t really do that. Additionally, we wanted to encourage our partners to look at the entire portfolio and be encouraged by representing all Fortra. We had different agreements and we had different programs by product lines and we needed to bring it all together.

And so as I joined, we did the FortraOne agreement, which brings everything into one unified legal agreement to be able to represent our products. And that’s the easy part. Second, we wanted to provide incentives to our partners to represent not only the products they’re familiar with, but all the other products that we had. And guaranteed margin was the best way to do it.

Now there’s no guesswork on partner profitability. You know what you’re going to be making. And when you know that upfront, you can now focus in on the real problem at hand is providing customer solutions. We can work on it jointly. I can tell you I’ve been in the industry long enough where I continuously talk to partners and their pain points are around profitability and the unknown. Working deals and then being squeezed or not knowing what they’re going to make until the very end. And you’ve spent all this time working on these solutions and then you are not going to kind of have that profitability that you want. That’s a big deal. And we took the guesswork out of it. And now let’s focus on the customer, which is quite from what I hear the most important thing.

Robert Dutt: I’ve heard the same thing, believe it or not. What do you see as sort of the, as you’re looking at the platform structure and trying to make it easier and more smooth for partners to sell across that, what are kind of the one or two top entry points for partners? And what do you see as sort of the next adjacencies that partners naturally gravitate towards as they get to know what all you guys are doing and get comfortable with the model?

Faraz Siraj: Yeah, I think the best entry point would be around data protection. And we offer so many varieties of security solutions, but the best way is around data protection. And let’s face it, data has been exploding and will continue to explode. There is a fun new variable out there called AI that is in the forefront of everybody’s minds. And it’s being utilized for the right reasons and the wrong reasons.

And whatever your case is, you need to protect your data with however which way it’s exposed. And so we have data protection solutions that will be enhanced by AI, but also will protect against AI because your data is the most valuable commodity that you have as a company. And so with our data protection, such as our DLP solutions, our data classification solutions, DSPM, that’s a great entry point. And then you can expand from there with the use of the platform. But that’s what I highly recommend for partners that are just getting into this.

Robert Dutt: You joined Fortra in late 2024, and this is being described as kind of the company’s first dedicated channel push. For Canadian MSPs who aren’t in the ecosystem currently, what’s the realistic on-ramp for working with you guys? And I’m curious where you’re at in the Canadian market in terms of is there a distribution and go-to-market story here, or is it sort of primarily still being built around the US model?

Faraz Siraj: No, it’s a true North American model. By the way, we acquired a few Canadian companies, and we have several Canadian MSPs already that we work with. We are always looking to expand within the Canadian market.

Companies that we acquired that are well-known in Canada, such as Terra Nova and Titus. Terra Nova out of Montreal. Titus was out of, I believe, Ottawa. Terra Nova, by the way, human risk management or security awareness training, if you want to call it, is an MSP’s dream. It can be branded by a partner, and it can be run as if it were the partner’s business. And we actually go to market heavily with a lot of Canadian companies for that particular product line.

If you ever wanted the easy button to get involved with Fortra, it would really be the Terra Nova product, human risk management, because everybody needs security awareness training. I go through it every six months at Fortra ourselves. I’m a user on product, but you need to have that refresher, because in the simplest forms, we are exposed to crazy stuff that comes to us, and you need to be trained on it.

So that’s where I would go from a market perspective, but we love our Canadian companies, and we’ll continue to operate that way.

Robert Dutt: It sounds like you’re open to adding additional MSPs, obviously. What do you find are some of the common threads among successful Fortra MSPs?

Faraz Siraj: It really is around providing good customer joint solutions. We obviously want to be in the software business, but we also want to be with partners that align to that software as well as providing the customer satisfaction. And so the ones that do it well are the ones that are able to bolt onto their services on top of the solution and do it well. And we’re not hearing about issues. In fact, the successful ones are the ones that are expanding those solutions and going into more and more customers.

The other piece of it is being able to be creative with billing for the partner so that it entices them to go out and obviously have partner profitability.

Robert Dutt: If an MSP is listening to this and they’re doing the standard defensive stack – EDR, SIEM, firewall – but they’ve never really offered anything on the offensive side, what’s the first conversation they should be having with customers? And how do they avoid turning offense into, you know, the once-a-year pentest PDF and call it a day kind of thing?

Faraz Siraj: Yeah, well, it really goes back to understanding the customer. Now, it starts with, yes, pen testing is very important, but it’s not just once a year. Given today’s threat landscape, you need to do that a lot more often.

Vulnerability management, those are the two major entry points. We built our vulnerability management tool from a mixture of six different technologies from six different companies, and we fused it together to make our own Fortra vulnerability management tool. Such companies like Tripwire, Digital Defense, Beyond Security, even a little bit of Alert Logic that was in there and there’s a couple others that I’m forgetting, but when you’re able to do that, it makes for a great value product.

Robert Dutt: Interesting conversation. I appreciate the colour around the partner program and I appreciate the idea of adding offensive capabilities to the MSP stack. I think that’ll be an interesting space to watch. Faraz, thank you very much for joining us.

Faraz Siraj: Oh, you bet. Thank you, Robert.

Robert Dutt: There you have it, Faraz Siraj from Fortra. I’d like to thank Faraz for his time. I appreciated his candor, especially on the managed services exit and the reality of what MSPs should and shouldn’t try to take on when it comes to offensive security.

Thank you for listening today. A couple things that stuck with me from this conversation. First, the Alert Logic move. When a vendor sells off their managed services business and tells you straight up, we’re in the business of making software and not competing with you on services, that’s worth paying attention to. Doesn’t guarantee anything, but it’s the right signal. And in a market where MSPs are constantly wondering which vendors are going to show up as competitors, it matters.

Second, the platform story. 20-plus acquisitions is a lot of integration work. And I think the jury’s still out on how seamless that experience actually is for partners day to day. But the FortraOne agreement and the guaranteed margin model suggest they’re at least thinking about the partner experience at the business level, not just the technology level.

And for Canadian MSPs specifically, the Terra Nova and Titus acquisitions mean there’s a local footprint here that a lot of people might not realize.

If you’re not subscribed to the ChannelBuzz.ca podcast, now’s a great time. You can find us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, and most podcast directories. If you’re finding value in these conversations, a rating or review goes a long way.

Until next time, I’m Robert Dutt for ChannelBuzz.ca, and I’ll see you in the channel.

Robert Dutt: Hello and welcome to In the Channel from ChannelBuzz.ca, bringing news and information to the Canadian IT channel community for the last 16 years. I’m Robert Dutt, editor of ChannelBuzz.ca, and as always, your host for the show.

If you’ve been following the cybersecurity conversation this year, you’ve probably noticed that identity keeps coming up – not as one item on the security checklist, but increasingly as the item.

The attack surface is shifting. SaaS sprawl, shadow AI, and a growing universe of non-human identities – things like AI agents, service accounts, and API keys – are creating access governance challenges that traditional security tools were never designed to handle. And for MSPs, that shift represents both a risk and an opportunity to build a real practice around identity security.

1Password is a company that a lot of us know, but the Toronto-based company has evolved beyond the password vault that many partners may remember. It’s now positioning itself as an Extended Access Management platform, recently expanded its global partner program, and counts more than 180,000 businesses among its customers.

Joining me today to talk about what that evolution means for the channel is Larissa Crandall, global vice president of channel and alliances at 1Password. We’re going to dig into why identity has become the front door to the security conversation, what MSPs need to understand about non-human identities before their customers start asking, and what building a profitable identity security practice actually looks like.

Larissa, thanks for taking the time. I appreciate it.

Larissa Crandall: Thank you so much for having me. Excited for a conversation.

Robert Dutt: We keep hearing that identity is the new security perimeter. For a lot of MSPs, the bread and butter is still firewall, endpoint, some MFA. Can you help me with what’s changing in the threat landscape that makes identity security an urgent, a “build a practice around it right now” kind of opportunity?

Larissa Crandall: Yeah, absolutely. AI is here to stay. I think the opportunity for MSPs is now. It’s prevalent. We’re seeing a lot of MSPs build practices around identity security, and those are the ones that are getting ahead of it, are leading the charge. I think for us personally, spending a lot of time with MSPs, the attack surface has changed. It’s no longer about human, it’s about non-human identities, and it spans across SaaS applications, endpoints, APIs, service accounts, and AI agents. All of the MSPs that are getting ahead of it are helping our customers and growing.

Robert Dutt: You guys have been around for 20 years now or so. I think for a lot of folks, the on-ramp, the familiar place is the personal password vault, of course. Some partners certainly are selling you alongside other tools, are working you into the mix. What would surprise a partner who hasn’t looked closely at 1Password in the last couple of years about where you guys are at right now?

Larissa Crandall: Love this question, because I’ve been talking to a lot of partners. As we’ve built out the partner program that we just launched and going to truly partner first, we have to – what I call – myth bust. A lot of how people perceived us is just traditional EPM, the Enterprise Password Manager business, into this true solution that’s attached to everything that they’re already selling. For instance, we have large integrations with CrowdStrike and Zscaler, and that’s getting the attention of some of the partners out there not realizing that we fit into that full conversation and that tech stack as a platform play, versus thinking of us traditionally just on that human-centric credential management play. We’ve definitely flipped the script, I would say, on having sellers think of us different. MSPs – we also have a lot that we’re doing with AWS, and that has changed some of the landscape for us here, is positioning that full technology solution.

Robert Dutt: You touch on partner first on the program launch. Can you walk me through what partner first means from a 1Password point of view at this point and the highlights there in terms of what it means to your partner base or your prospective partner base?

Larissa Crandall: Sure, absolutely. We built what I call a customer-centric partner strategy. What that means to us internally – and as I’ve shared this with our partner ecosystem – is however a customer wants to transact with us. Via AWS Marketplace, whether they want to work with us with a partner through Marketplace, if they want to work with their traditional reseller and VAR partners out there. We have obviously SMB customers, a lot around working with their MSPs. We have that all taken care of, where we have prescriptive partners across the globe as well as working with our distribution partners. What that means for us internally is we have worked through an entire strategy top-down. It goes from our executives all the way through our sellers that they’re to engage partners. Now it could be an existing account that we have that we’re wanting to bring a partner into. We’re also spending a lot of time with partners, both new and existing, teaching them the 1Password story and teaching them how we fit in what they’re selling today and what the opportunity is. Increased enablement, certifications, all of that. Again, it goes back to what I would say is that myth bust of how you think of us and what we’re doing, versus how we’re getting a lot of attention from partners that have talked with us previous but are seeing us different, talking about putting us in their AI labs and their security practices and a full wrapper into platform.

Robert Dutt: That’s two fronts of myth busting, or developing the stories to partners. Where would you say you’re at in getting that out there, broadly disseminated and well understood on both of those fronts?

Larissa Crandall: It’s a daily, right? I think it’s a daily spend. I spent this morning talking to two partners and they were both new. They were in a region that we have not spoken to before, and it was newer partners wanting to learn more because they’re hearing the market demand and they’re having customers call about 1Password and identity security. That has flipped as well, where identity security is no longer a “it’s a nice” – it’s needed. Same thing across MSPs. They’re building foundational practices as well around identity security and we’re having them come to us and say, “Teach us more. How do we build this? How do we do the discovery and how do we get in front of it?” Especially around AI.

Robert Dutt: You’ve talked about something you call the Access-Trust Gap – the space between what IT can see and control versus what employees are actually using to get their work done. Can you walk us through what that looks like in a real organization and the why as to why traditional IAM tools aren’t closing that gap?

Larissa Crandall: I have an example for you that I love to use, and it’s related to an MSP that we have that shared with us how they personally worked with 1Password. It’s a mature MSP that made a deliberate decision as a company to bring in 1Password and make it mandatory for all of their customers. Not an add-on – make it mandatory for all. They did that because they wanted to ensure that security was embedded into everything they did from the start and how they interacted with customers. The reason that they did that is they wanted to make sure – if they weren’t ahead of it and they weren’t giving customers a secure way to manage their credentials, they would find their own way. That’s the problem still. There’s spreadsheets, there’s shared sticky notes. You put it in your phone. That’s never good.

This MSP shared that and said, “If we’re going to go preach this and sell 1Password, we’re going to basically do it ourselves.” If you leave it up to your own devices, employees will do it on their own and that’s the big risk. For us, that’s the big opportunity that we’re sharing with our partners to make sure that they know that – that is not the way to go. You need to make sure that you’re protecting it. You can’t begin to address that identity sprawl if you haven’t first secured the front door. When we say that to partners, we let that sink in. If you haven’t done it personally as an organization and you’re working with customers, you have to secure that front door. MSPs that are building the basics and getting ahead of it are going to nail this and be far ahead of their competition. I love that example because it’s a real life, “If I’m going to go sell it, I’m going to make sure that we’re using it ourselves.”

Robert Dutt: The new front, I think, that’s maybe catching MSPs a little bit off guard, that’s certainly building awareness, is the non-human identities side of things. You touched on AI agents a little earlier, the service accounts, the API keys – the things that need credentials but aren’t employees. How big of a governance problem is this becoming and what does it mean for an MSP who’s trying to help clients figure this out and navigate this problem?

Larissa Crandall: It’s a big problem. Non-human machines are growing every day, and a stat that we’ve been using and explaining this – just on the severity of it – with our partners, is non-human identities now outnumber human 82 to 1. Think about that. If that is the number of how much you would have to protect non-human, you can’t just think about it from that human perspective. “I log in, I do the right thing.” It’s everything that they don’t know. That gap, again, is helping customers get that visibility and control around that across human and non-human, is generally hard to replicate because you have to teach it.

That’s where, again, the partners come in and they bring that up and explain that. They’re ahead of it. What I will say, though, is SMBs are not ahead of that just yet. They’re not thinking about non-human every day, and that’s where partners can come in and being their true trusted advisor and explain that and explain the risk to their businesses. Because that’s their job – to keep businesses running – and that’s why customers go to them.

Robert Dutt: For an MSP who’s at the point of saying, “OK, I see your point. I see the opportunity around identity security. I need to build around this,” but they aren’t there yet necessarily – what does a profitable identity security practice look like? What are they selling? What services are they wrapping around it? Where do you fit into that stack?

Larissa Crandall: MSPs are all different. Obviously, they’re great about doing that first initial assessment and analyzing the infrastructure and set of tools and governance that they have. I think the first piece that we’re explaining, and we’re talking to MSPs, is just how to get started and how to build a practice around this. You first have to do that discovery. Most customers are not getting an accurate inventory of what they have. That piece, and explaining “if you do this, here’s the risk mitigation around it, this is how it could help your business.” The second piece I think that some don’t really truly understand is the scope complexity, meaning identifying the infrastructure, the dev, the security, the operations team, everybody else that’s all-encompassing around this.

I think the third is staffing. Some MSPs don’t realize, “OK, if we have this, how do we build a profitable practice?” – you need to ensure that you have the right skill set from your own teams to do that assessment up front. It’s a step-by-step, but you can’t do only one of those. Proper discovery, scope, and staffing are really key.

Robert Dutt: You guys are a Toronto-based company. For Canadian MSPs or resellers in the audience, is there anything specific about how you’re building the partner ecosystem up here in the market that they should know about, and what’s the first step that a partner should take who’s intrigued by this conversation and wants to find out more?

Larissa Crandall: Join a partner program. Obviously, I will say that. I think one of the proud moments for us right now is we launched a new partner program in February. Simplified, it did increase profitability and economics for them, and also did a complete overhaul of all the training, enablement, everything that they were asking for. It sounds simple, hard to do. We did this outside in. We spent a lot of time surveying Canadian resellers, MSPs across the world and really asking them what was needed around that. When we launched it, we had a record number of logins immediately on our partner portal in the first eight days of the program that we had seen in a while. That just goes to show that there’s just this strong pent-up demand for “Teach me and tell me more” because they’re hearing customers with some of these issues. We want to be there first and foremost and be proactive with them. Join the program. That’s what I would say. It’s very simple to start. I promise you, it’s a very profitable program. We’ll help you through and do all the onboarding and spend some time with us.

Robert Dutt: From a Canadian point of view, anything particular that you’re looking at in the market up here, as far as building the ecosystem or as far as how you view where the Canadian channel’s at with you guys?

Larissa Crandall: I’ve spent quite a bit of time there, talking to partners up there and spending some time with AWS. We spent a lot of time – we just won the Rising Star Award for Canada for the work that we’ve done in partnership with AWS. That has got a lot of press for us personally and what we’re doing and how we’re building solutions together. I would also say we have quite a bit of employees there, obviously. That’s been where we started. I would say a lot of loyal partners that have been with us through the entire journey. I would say that I’m hoping they’re pleased with all the changes and the added incentives there, and happy to talk to them.

Robert Dutt: All right, a few quick-answer lightning round type questions before we wrap up.

You touched upon this a little bit, but can you maybe elaborate? When you talk to MSPs who are doing identity security really well, what’s one thing that’s common amongst them? What’s the common thread amongst those who are doing well in this space?

Larissa Crandall: Great. I would say exactly how we started this conversation – that they have recognized that AI is here and here to stay, and the ones that have built in the forefront and done really well with enablement out to their customers around that human and non-human identity security space and explained it are crushing it. Those are the ones that we’re seeing seat count increase, seeing some of their large customers come on and do true – what I would say, we call it – wall to wall. Bring in customers that have done exactly what that mature MSP did and said, “If we’re going to go do this and preach it ourselves and sell it, we better make sure that we are doing it as a company.” We’re continually seeing that. The ones that really get that from the very beginning are the ones that are on the forefront and being proactive about it versus reactive. You have to be trusted advisors out there, especially to even the SMB community.

Robert Dutt: Finally, without naming any names if you don’t want to, what’s the worst password hygiene you have personally witnessed?

Larissa Crandall: I would say sticky notes. I would say everything that your grandparents have done, your parents have done. I think it’s one of those where we’re all guilty of – where do we put that password? Did you share it with someone? That’s the worst thing that you can do. Of course, I work here, I’m going to say it, but being a 1Password customer even before – and that’s the fun about being here. I could be in an airport, I’d have a 1Password sweatshirt on walking through and we’re this beloved brand out there because they started with us on that B2C journey and have moved and brought us through into their businesses today. It’s a great place to be.

Robert Dutt: Quite the evolution, and thanks for walking us through it, and good luck with the program rollout. Thank you so much for taking the time.

Larissa Crandall: Thank you so much, Robert. I appreciate it.

[MUSIC]

Robert Dutt: My thanks to Larissa Crandall from 1Password for that conversation.

A couple of things I want you to take away from it. First, that stat: non-human identities now outnumber human identities 82 to 1. If that number doesn’t make you rethink the scope of the identity conversation you’re having with customers, I’m not sure what will. Second, the MSP who made 1Password mandatory across their entire customer base – not as an add-on, not as an option, but as a baseline requirement for doing business. That’s the kind of conviction that turns a product into a practice. Whether 1Password is the right fit for your stack or not, the broader point stands: identity security is no longer a nice to have, and the MSPs who treat it that way are the ones building real recurring revenue around it.

Thanks for listening today. If you haven’t already, please do consider subscribing to or following the podcast in your podcast app of choice. We’re up on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube Music, iHeartRadio, and more. And if you’re old school and you like your RSS feed to be, well, an RSS feed, we got you covered too. Until next time, I’m Robert Dutt for ChannelBuzz.ca, and I’ll see you in the channel.

Robert Dutt: Hello and welcome to In The Channel from ChannelBuzz.ca, bringing news and information to the Canadian IT channel community for the last 16 years. I’m Robert Dutt, editor of ChannelBuzz.ca and your host for the show.

My guest this week is Joe Smolarski, the CEO of WatchGuard Technologies. Joe took the helm at WatchGuard back in November after spending nearly a decade at Kaseya, where he served as president and COO. He’s now leading a company that just celebrated its 30th anniversary, has been 100% channel-focused since day one, and is making a pretty bold claim that 2026 is the year of the cybersecurity-focused MSP.

Now, that’s the kind of line that can sound like vendor marketing if you’re not careful, so I wanted to dig into what’s actually behind it. We talked about the explosion in endpoint malware, why the shift from ransomware to pure data extortion changes the game for MSPs, what Joe is bringing from his Kaseya experience and what he’s leaving behind, and why he thinks Canadian MSPs are at a tipping point. We also get into the economics of it all – his promise to double MSP margins on cybersecurity, and how WatchGuard’s platform play is supposed to make that math work.

Let’s get right into it. My chat with Joe Smolarski.

Thanks for taking the time, I appreciate it.

Joe Smolarski: My pleasure, Rob.

Robert Dutt: Security has been one of the biggest, maybe the biggest, growth driver for MSPs for years, and your company is saying that 2026 is the year of the cybersecurity-focused MSP. Help me understand what makes this year different from the last three or four, where people have been seeing the same kind of momentum in security in the MSP space.

Joe Smolarski: Yeah, sure, Rob. I think ultimately many of the stats are clear, and they’re really eye-opening. I think no longer are MSPs having to educate and evangelize why it’s needed, because when you see eye-popping stats like the fact that cybercrime is the third largest GDP in the world behind the US and China, it’s like, holy cow, how the heck is that possible? But it’s escalated very, very quickly.

And unfortunately for SMBs, SMBs have become the focus of those attacks, and I think that’s becoming clearer and clearer every day. SMBs used to feel as though they’re not the focus, that the big guys will be the focus. But what we’ve seen – and unfortunately I have some firsthand experience – is that when cybercriminals attack the big guys, they have people come after them.

If you know my past, I served as president and COO of Kaseya for nearly a decade prior to becoming CEO at WatchGuard. And there, on July 2nd of 2021, we got attacked by Russian cybercriminals. When that occurred, within four hours I had the FBI and the White House and Department of Homeland Security and everybody else in my office, which was not very pleasant. So you get the attention when you’re a major provider, a big company. Look at Stryker right now, what they’re going through.

In that situation, within four hours, they’re all in my office. Within three weeks, we got the bad guys, and those bad guys are sitting in a federal prison right now. But that’s not the case when it comes to SMBs, and it’s a shame. I had access to a bunch of inside information within the government when we went through that, because we also hired the FBI lead as our CISO at that time. And what they say is they’re just overwhelmed. There’s no way that they could get to all of the attacks that are occurring. The big guys get attention and the small guys don’t, and that’s become prevalent.

So I think ultimately, this is the year for cybersecurity to get to that next level because the pace of attacks is picking up so much, in particular in the SMB market. We posted our bi-annual security report and showed a 1,500% increase over the last year, just in the velocity of attacks, which is scary. It’s scary for SMBs. And quite frankly, even if they have some of their own internal IT staff, they’re not going to be at the level that they require to stay protected. So they’re relying on the fantastic MSPs that are out there to get them to that next level.

I will say, I caught up with three or four large MSPs in Canada over the last week, just to prepare for this a little bit, just to get some of the latest trends directly from the MSPs themselves. And they said they still feel like Canada is a little bit behind when it comes to the US, just a little bit behind in terms of education and things like that. And certainly, small business is so prevalent in Canada, given how dispersed it is.

So they’re working on that. I know your government in Canada is working to increase regulation. I think some of the fighting back and forth with Trump and Carney has been interesting and ultimately fueling the Buy Canadian campaigns and some of that stuff. But you’ve got a lot going on. I know you’ve got a C-26 bill from an infrastructure perspective trying to be passed, just to make sure that the awareness is there for all businesses on what needs to be protected – supply chain and everything else.

But it’s a huge opportunity for the MSP market to take it to that next level, because from my perspective, Rob, you have to. What I’ve seen – and this is very, very unfair – is that when a small business even declines that next level of, say, platinum service from an MSP, they’re like, “I don’t need that. We don’t need that level of protection. We’re not willing to pay that amount.” If something negative happens, then unfortunately the MSP still gets blamed. And that’s ridiculous, but it’s the reality of the situation. So this is the year to capitalize on it. There’s enough news and information out there that supports everything. It’s an exciting year and, of course, a nervous year, because you’ve got to protect your clients and use the best technology and services to get there.

Robert Dutt: You touch on the 1,500% spike in endpoint malware in the second half. A quarter of those attacks are evading signature-based detection. At the same time, though, your team is predicting that crypto-ransomware is essentially going extinct this year as attackers say, “You know what? We’d rather just steal the data and extort you.” What does that shift mean practically for how MSPs need to think about protection and what they’ve been offering, given that ransomware has been such a driver for the last half decade or so?

Joe Smolarski: Yeah, I think ultimately you just have to make sure that you have layers of protection. To your point, lots of things get through. You could have the very best technology in the world, whether that’s WatchGuard or some of the other leading providers, and things can get through. Ultimately, that’s why you need the layers.

One of the things that you should also consider is the platform approach. There are many providers, WatchGuard being one of the leading providers in the MSP space. When you have a platform that gives you multiple layers and those layers get to be correlated together, it just increases your chances of detecting those things. You may see something on the firewall that’s not definitive evidence of something happening, but when you piece that together with what’s happening on the endpoint and you’ve got those two data points, you piece it together faster than point solutions can.

I think ultimately you need to make sure you have 24/7 SOC monitoring. Things that you didn’t think were possible – you thought you put in the best products to protect you, why do I need that, nothing should get through. You just threw the stats out there that things do get through. The only way to stop that is to catch those anomalies at one of the respective layers. If you’re at 99.9999%, you’ll get it at the product level. But what gets through – and with the velocity of attacks that is there – you’ve got to make sure you’ve got AI-based SOC solutions and MDR solutions backed up by great security professionals to ensure you’re protected.

Robert Dutt: On the AI tip, you guys have predicted the first fully autonomous, end-to-end executed-by-AI cyberattack this year. That’s a big call. What would that look like? And how do I, as a mid-market MSP, even begin to prepare for something like that?

Joe Smolarski: Number one, it should scare the heck out of us. It scares me. It certainly scares me, Rob. It’s a world that is evolving very quickly.

I think AI in and of itself – there are some anomalies. I’ve done a few interviews where I’ve said half of AI is bullcrap. Because so many people claim AI and everybody’s taking credit for it. Some of it’s real, some of it’s not. But what’s very real is the rate of acceleration of technological advancement, both for the good guys and unfortunately for the bad guys.

So I think you can’t fight AI attacks with human-based people. You need to fight AI with AI. There’s no way, from a rate of defense, pace of defense, that you can fight that with just good security professionals. You want to make sure, as the complexities of these attacks, the velocity of these attacks – because it is AI-based – continues to accelerate at an unprecedented pace, that you’re fighting that with AI-based solutions. Because it can match the speed and complexity of the response.

We’re seeing it. While we haven’t seen a complete 100% autonomous end-to-end, we’re seeing pieces that are getting very, very close. We have so many millions and billions of data points coming through and it’s getting scarier by the day. Our job is to stay ahead of that. We stopped billions and billions of attacks last year and we had seven reports come through of malware that maybe got through. So the success rate is phenomenal, but the only way that will stay phenomenal is if we just stay on top of that 24/7, 365 and read all the indicators of what the bad guys are doing and how we need to stay ahead of that to protect our MSPs and protect our end customers.

Robert Dutt: We talked about platformization a little bit off the top. I wanted to circle back to that. First, you’ve been pretty open about bringing the Kaseya playbook to WatchGuard – driving down platform costs, consolidating tools, increasing margins. But Kaseya can be a complicated word in the MSP space. Some partners hear it and think great economics. Others hear it and think about aggressive bundling or the friction of integrating acquisitions. Which parts of the playbook are you looking to bring to WatchGuard, and which parts are you consciously choosing to leave behind?

Joe Smolarski: Yeah, definitely. And listen, every company has its pros and cons. And certainly over there, I was the number two, not the number one, which is a difference, because you’ve got to abide by certain things. It had a fantastic leader with Fred and a great leader with Rania in the current leadership. But I think ultimately what always resonated – no matter, I say time and time again, even if somebody didn’t like certain practices at Kaseya – what always resonated was, “I need to lower my operating costs because my margins are too tight and I can’t scale efficiently.” It’ll be tough to get liquidity as an MSP if I’m not getting the proper margins and profitability. And we know that there’s a great opportunity for MSPs to get liquidity and have an event, because there’s a great rollup occurring in the industry.

So just making sure that the unit economics continue to get better. And the second component is just an integrated platform. It makes all the difference in the world. Imagine you hiring your next technician, your next engineer, and then you’ve got to reach out to seven different vendors to get that person set up. That engineer has to learn seven different platforms and seven different logins and swivel chair through all of it. So those two components, no matter what, always resonated with the base, whether they were Kaseya lovers or Kaseya haters, those two things always resonated. And those are some of the common components.

I think the benefit for me, and the reason why I left a very successful career at Kaseya – we did a lot of great things from a financial perspective, growing it tenfold in my tenure there – the reason why I left and the reason why I took that call is because WatchGuard just has a tremendous partner focus and is well respected in the industry. So you take that, you take the great products that we have, and then you have the focus on the unit economics that I’m certainly bringing to the table. It’s just very, very important.

Sometimes an MSP needs some bells and whistles and sometimes they just need it to work and be a world-class security solution that gets to lower their costs in parallel. And that’s what we’ve done. It’s just a great combination of a company that is 1,000% focused on the partner community. That’s all we do.

If you look at us compared to very amazing firms like a CrowdStrike – just phenomenal firms – but they’re not solely focused on MSPs. Prior to a decade ago when I joined Kaseya, I spent my life in the enterprise. And when you’re a firm dealing with enterprises and MSPs, I’m sorry, but it’s only natural that the enterprise gets the attention. They just do because, number one, if you look at how they segment their customer base, the Bank of America and the General Electric – when they call in, they’re going to get prioritized, let alone the human element. When you’re on support and you’re dealing with the big guy versus the little guy, it’s just different. You go above and beyond.

That’s why for us, we never try to mix the two. We want to make sure that we’re dedicated to the MSP community. It makes a massive difference in terms of focus. We understand that if we let an MSP down, this is their livelihood. You let an IT director down at Bank of America, his life keeps on going. But you let an MSP down and this is their absolute livelihood, and we just can’t let that happen. That’s embedded throughout the culture of WatchGuard, which we’re super proud of. You put great products on top of that and the focus on unit economics, and it’s getting that cost down so that we allow them to be more aggressive.

You and I talked earlier in the call about the fact that if an MSP offers a cybersecurity package and it gets declined, they’re still going to get blamed. So if we can keep getting that cost down to allow them to make sure all of their end customers are protected, it’s just a great thing for all. And that’s our genuine focus and we’re super excited about it.

Robert Dutt: You’ve said that you want to double MSP margins on cybersecurity, and that’s a very specific promise, one that I have to imagine gets a lot of MSPs’ ears perked up. Can you walk me through the mechanics of how that actually works? Is this pricing, is it operational efficiency through the platform? And what does that transition to higher margins look like for a Canadian MSP with, say, 500 managed endpoints?

Joe Smolarski: Yeah, listen, I think it’s all of the above, Rob. If you look at it, you can buy a dirt cheap solution and think that you’re saving money. But when it comes to cybersecurity, you buy a dirt cheap solution and then you get bombarded with alerts and noise and everything else. All you’re doing is increasing your operational headcount, your human capital. And you’re getting an absolutely nasty math equation that you just didn’t realize when you signed on the dotted line up front for the rock bottom price.

So it’s not solely based on price. This is a world where there is a ton of noise. And if you’re not efficient with what we’re providing to the MSP in terms of threat indicators and things like that, they just get overwhelmed and either have to overstaff to accommodate for it, or they miss important things and ultimately allow bad stuff to occur within their environments.

For us, we really focus on simplicity of the platform and making sure that we can give you absolute world-class solutions. You do the research on WatchGuard – we have world-class solutions across the board with tremendous success rates. So give world-class solutions, limit the noise that an MSP has to deal with, and always be there for that MSP when something occurs. We have a six-minute response time on our SOC, which is best in the industry.

All of those things combined, along with very aggressive commercials. We have to be. We’re getting more and more aggressive when it comes to commercials and have a lot of great stuff planned for this year. I’ve been here four months, so give me a little bit of time, just a little bit. But we’re making progress every single day to continue to meet the needs of our MSP community. Get that price further down, improve the unit economics, and more importantly just provide a great simplified platform that simply works, and always show up when our customers need us.

Robert Dutt: You’ve shipped a lot of product in a short time. The Zero Trust Bundle, FireCloud, Open MDR with third-party support, the unified agent. For an MSP that’s currently running your firewalls, maybe another piece of the stack, what’s the realistic path, the realistic starting point to adopting the full platform, and how do you avoid the rip-and-replace fatigue that you can feel from vendors who are in the platform play?

Joe Smolarski: Yeah, we’re doing everything we can to avoid the fatigue. Not to kick anybody when they’re down, but we’ve had a flurry of major activity from SonicWall customers looking for relief from some of the challenges they’ve had. Our team has worked around the clock to put together fast, easy, white-glove migration using AI that can carry across profiles and configs to make it as easy as possible to reduce that fatigue when you do decide to move.

We definitely concentrate on reducing that fatigue through automated migrations using AI tools to make sure that some of those things happen. But fatigue aside, in terms of next logical steps – we’re blessed, we have 25,000 MSP partners, most of which are using our firewall solution, which we’re famous for. The red boxes. It’s world-class and extremely well respected.

If they’re just using the traditional firewall, the next easy logical step is to get the endpoint protection with fully managed SOC, because you need it and it just works so tightly together. Our goal when we work with our partners is just to show that one plus one truly does equal three. We work on that every day through additional integrations and ease of migration tools. We’re super excited about it, and we think it’s going to be a banner year for us. We had a record-breaking 2025 and think we’re just getting started at this stage.

Robert Dutt: Vector Capital has been involved with you guys for decades, which is pretty unusual for private equity. Your partners are making long-term bets on the platform – obviously, that’s the nature of the beast. What are you giving them in terms of assurance that there’s continuity of investment there, that this structure keeps going, that it doesn’t become a growth-for-exit kind of play?

Joe Smolarski: Yeah, well, I think you just answered it for me. You just said Vector’s been involved for decades. That is very rare, Rob. Very, very rare.

Number one, Vector’s just a fantastic partner. I’ve dealt with many different private equity firms. I’ve been in private equity my entire life – very prestigious ones. Insight was fantastic at Kaseya. But ultimately, Vector has been in this for the long run. Some of the principals at Vector have personal financial interest in this company, which just creates a loyalty and a common vision for us to build a great company. And they tell me that every single day. We don’t build for an exit. We want to build a great company. We believe we have a great image and perception and brand in the market today, and we’ll never do anything to compromise that.

Our focus is to build a great company, protect our partners, continue to build with our partners. Both myself, the WatchGuard team, and Vector – that’s the sole focus here. Because they’ve been involved for decades, it’s a little bit different than many other firms that are going through change of ownership every couple of years. And then they’ve got to cut costs and go through all that. We’ve had stability from that perspective, which is great.

We’re still a business. We’re a for-profit business. We’re not a charity. So of course we always have to make business decisions in an ever-changing business world. But I think that continuity has really made a big difference. Having a private equity firm that has a personal interest in this company has made a big difference for us, and I think our partners see that with the level of focus and dedication to the partner community.

Robert Dutt: Earlier in the conversation you mentioned data sovereignty. You mentioned some of the moves being made on the government side in terms of legislation. As you’re pushing a cloud-delivered security platform, how do you see data sovereignty factoring into that?

Joe Smolarski: Yeah, it always has to, because otherwise it’ll preclude you from being able to penetrate certain markets. Ultimately, that started decades ago in Europe, in terms of having to make sure that data is stored locally. Any major vendor needs to make sure that focus is there. Canada is catching up quickly in terms of many of those requirements.

Sure, it requires extra capital and build-out in terms of making sure we have local data centers and all of that. But at this stage of the world, unfortunately it’s getting more complex with all the wars and the turbulence that’s in the world now, which is unprecedented. So you’re going to get more of that – “No, it can’t leave the country, it’s got to be here” – more and more. All of us in the SaaS space need to be prepared for additional investments to accommodate for that. You’re not going to win and be able to get that business at a large scale without it.

Our business has quickly taken off in many key areas. You may have seen we just announced the Bell Cyber partnership this week. Bell is the largest telco in Canada, as you know better than me, and Bell Cyber is their cyber arm. They’re embedding WatchGuard to make sure their customers are protected. As part of that, we had to make sure that there are no data sovereignty issues when you’re going to the largest telco to get to their millions and millions of customers.

We’re super proud of that. WatchGuard – we’re not at the level of a gazillion-dollar firm, but we’re big, we’re serious, we have great technology. And to go and get the number one telco in Canada to use our solution for their cybersecurity offering is just evidence of how we’re attacking problems like that.

Robert Dutt: I’m curious, as you’ve looked over the landscape, do you see the Canadian market differently than the US in terms of MSP maturity, cybersecurity adoption, those kinds of market condition issues?

Joe Smolarski: I think the Canadian market is a fantastic market in this space that is ripe for the next level of maturity. As I mentioned, and this is not coming from my speculation, this is coming directly from some of the larger MSPs. I think F12 and Calvin caught up with them and a bunch of others earlier this week. Large, prestigious MSPs that are doing great things and growing significantly.

Canada is just a little bit further behind, needs a little bit more education from an end-customer perspective. As regulation comes up, that’s going to solve some of that. As some of the geopolitical stuff continues to occur, that’s going to happen. The consolidation that we saw in the US on the MSP side, starting maybe five, six, seven years ago, is starting to pick up in the Canadian market as well.

And that’s a great opportunity. To me, MSPs should be excited. When you see consolidation occurring and rollups occurring, that’s a chance for you to get a nest egg. What we’ve seen is MSPs can get some liquidity, either stay invested or exit, and then they go do it again because they’ve got the playbook. The MSP world’s not that complicated in the sense that there are playbooks on how you win. We certainly work with a lot of MSPs to share those playbooks.

The Canadian market is ripe for that next level of maturity. I am super confident that it’s going to accelerate, because you have a lot of great MSPs and technology providers taking advantage of that now, and it’s going to continue.

Robert Dutt: You guys just turned 30. In a market where a lot of security vendors either get acquired, completely change what they’re doing, or flame out, what does that longevity actually mean? What do you see as the selling points of it, and what do you see as the baggage of having that long of a history?

Joe Smolarski: Listen, the selling points are we’re not going anywhere. We’ve been doing this for 30 years. We haven’t done it for 30 years at a small level, Rob. We’ll approach a half a billion dollars in revenue by the end of this year, well over $120, $130 million profit. We’re doing great things. We’re big, we’re stable, and that longevity gives customers and partners the assurance that we’re not going anywhere.

Because I think you know it – there are many firms out there that look sexy. They’ve got the sizzle. They’ve been around for three years and everybody’s talking about them. And then I meet with many of these CEOs from an acquisition perspective, and you talk to them and you realize, “Oh, they’ve never made any money.” And when you’ve never made any money, sometimes you can get away with that because you sell and do your thing. But many other times, there’s a reckoning from a macroeconomic perspective, where money’s not free anymore and ultimately either make money or there’s going to be a problem.

In those situations, when you change hands and you get swallowed up by a bigger company at some minimal value because of economic challenges, you invested in something that’s not going to be there for very long. Customers love knowing, “I can go with WatchGuard. I know you’re going to be around forever, quite frankly.” And they see how we’ve evolved. We have not been stagnant.

On the positive front, we went from being the leading provider of firewall solutions, which are still very critical from a perimeter security perspective, in the MSP and SMB space. We protect many of the agencies that are protecting the world. Our firewalls are in government agencies throughout the United States and throughout Canada that are actually protecting our soldiers. Our solutions are in fighter jets. So we’ve got a lot to be proud of just in terms of that level of security that our government relies on us for, which is amazing.

What you need to fight against, just to make it a balanced conversation, is being stagnant. This is a fast-changing world. If you’ve been here for decades, you have to make sure that you’re staying up with technology, understanding how AI can help you do your job three times more efficiently. Many people can, some can’t, but many people can because they have great roots in technology and innovation.

So you just have to keep pushing the team to be aggressive, not stagnant. And that’s what you get with me, certainly. I know how to push people. I’m a little bit over-energetic, probably a few too many Celsius on a daily basis. My goal is to get the most out of people, but when you have a great team and a great foundation like we do, it’s not that tough.

Robert Dutt: Just to wrap it up, let’s go back, if we can, to that Canadian MSP that we were talking about – that SMB-focused MSP who’s been focused on the firewall side of the business but hasn’t really gone too much deeper. What’s the single biggest reason that you see for them to take another look at what you guys are doing right now?

Joe Smolarski: I think the progression of our platform is well beyond what people understand. The level of embedded AI throughout the platform is beyond what they would expect – if they looked at us three, four years ago, they just don’t understand where we’re at today. Ultimately, we have an AI-enabled platform that’s dedicated to the MSP and SMB market.

Sure, firms like CrowdStrike are fantastic. They’re not dedicated to this. For us to have technology on par with anybody that’s out there throughout the entire cybersecurity stack and to solely dedicate that to the MSP and SMB market – so when you have a problem and you go through a breach or anything else and you call in, you’re not competing with Bank of America, you’re not competing with these other massive companies. You’re our sole focus. We understand your business is your lifeline.

You get all of that sophistication and then a level of simplicity provided within the platform that is second to none, to just make your job way more efficient. That’s the ultimate selling point for us – that you can get everything you need throughout the cybersecurity stack from WatchGuard, plus that friendliness of just the pure partner focus and commitment.

We truly believe the next few years are going to define which MSPs become security leaders and which stay as commodity IT providers. The opportunity is enormous. The demand is structural. And the partners who build disciplined, automated, security-first practices are really going to thrive. We’d love to be their partner.

Robert Dutt: It’s a great point to leave it on. Joe, I appreciate your taking the time. This has been a great conversation. I think you’ve given partners lots to think about.

Joe Smolarski: Thank you so much, Rob. Take care.

Robert Dutt: There you have it. Joe Smolarski from WatchGuard Technologies. I’d like to thank Joe for his time. This was actually one of his first podcast appearances, and I thought he was remarkably candid throughout. I appreciate that. And of course, thank you for listening.

A few things that stuck with me from this conversation. First, the honesty about AI. When a CEO tells you that half of what’s being called AI out there is, in his words, bullcrap, but then makes a clear case for where it genuinely matters – fighting the velocity of AI-driven attacks with AI-driven defense – that’s the kind of nuance I think partners need to hear more of.

Second, the Kaseya question. Joe didn’t dodge it. He acknowledged the baggage, drew a line between what he’s bringing forward – the unit economics focus, the platform consolidation – and what belongs in a different chapter. Whether that distinction holds up over time is something we’ll all be watching, but I thought that was a fair answer.

And third, the Canadian angle. WatchGuard’s partnership with Bell Cyber is a significant validation of their platform in this market. And Joe’s observation that Canada is ripe for the next level of MSP maturity, driven by regulation like C-26 and the consolidation wave that’s hitting us now, is worth paying attention to.

If you found this conversation useful, I’d love it if you’d follow or subscribe to the ChannelBuzz.ca podcast. You can find us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, and most other podcast directories. And if you’re feeling generous, a rating or review goes a long way towards helping other folks in the channel find us.

Until next time, I’m Robert Dutt for ChannelBuzz.ca, and I’ll see you in the channel.

Robert Dutt: Hello and welcome to In The Channel from ChannelBuzz.ca, bringing news and information to the Canadian IT channel for the last 16 years. I’m Robert Dutt, editor of ChannelBuzz.ca and your host for the show.

If you’ve been in the channel for any length of time, you know that finding and keeping cybersecurity talent is one of the biggest operational challenges MSPs and other solution providers face. Canada needs to fill roughly 25,000 cybersecurity roles and produces fewer than 4,000 graduates a year. That math doesn’t work, and it’s not getting better fast enough.

One program that’s been trying to move the needle is the ESET Women in Cybersecurity Scholarship, now in its 11th year globally and 5th year in Canada. This year, ESET is awarding three $5,000 scholarships to women in Canada who are pursuing careers in cybersecurity. Applications are open right now through April 8th.

But I didn’t want to just tell you that the scholarship exists. I wanted to dig into the thinking behind it. Why a security vendor invests in something like this, what happens with the talent it produces, and whether programs like this are actually connecting to the channel or feeding the pipeline somewhere else entirely. My guest today is Bob Bonneau, country manager for ESET Canada, and he had some candid answers to those questions. Let’s get right into it, my chat with Bob Bonneau.

Bob, thanks for taking the time. Nice to chat with you again.

Bob Bonneau: Likewise, I appreciate being here. Thanks for the invite. It’s always a pleasure to catch up.

Robert: The ESET Women in Cybersecurity Scholarship is in its 11th year now, 5th year in Canada. Can you tell me what was the original thinking behind expanding the program here, and has the program evolved in ways you didn’t expect when you were thinking about that five or six years ago?

Bob: Yeah, for me, as you know, I took over the role of leading Canada about six years ago, and it was too soon in the first year for us to kind of jump on board. But having been exposed to what the US office had initiated from an ESET perspective in terms of the scholarship was certainly something that I thought was just a great initiative and something that I was excited to kind of join and be part of. So I quickly made plans to ensure that we were included in the next year, and we’ve been a part of it ever since.

I would say initially, we started with a single $5,000 scholarship, and as much as there was — it was an investment we were making that, contrary to popular belief where every vendor-invested dollar, especially in something like this, has to have some sort of ROI metrics to it — this didn’t have that. This is purely something that we felt passionate about needing to do, and we thought it addressed a couple of different main areas in our business that we were trying to address.

But when I look at the early days, it was funny because it is very much a marketing effort just to get the information out there that we’re in fact offering it. So I would say we had the $5,000 scholarship offered and we worked hard to get that communicated out so that we could get a good submission base to start to evaluate.

And if we fast-forward to going into this year, it’s now scaled to three $5,000 scholarships that we’re offering. What used to be largely an internal company effort — we would look at the submissions and evaluate them and select the winners — there’s now a 10-person selection committee made up of representation from business, tech partners, large customers of ours, our reseller community. So it’s really expanded from there, and it’s great to see.

Part of why we scaled it is because the volume of submissions has grown so much, which is great. But quite frankly, the impressiveness of the applicants just makes that job really hard. So it really has evolved to what we’re seeing today, and it’s been great to be part of that. It’s also evolved from a company perspective, which is great. Now having, I think we’ve got seven countries participating in it.

Robert: Wow. So far you guys have awarded $50,000 to 14 Canadian women through this program. When you look at where past recipients have ended up, they’ve largely gone to work at tech companies rather than, say, roles in the channel with partners or MSPs. Is that the intended outcome, or is there a gap between investing in the pipeline and seeing that young talent show up in the channel?

Bob: Yeah, it’s a great point. I think the effort was obviously established to address two main gaps that we have in our business today. One, obviously, the underrepresentation of women in technology. I think that number is hovering around the mid-20% in Canada, but it’s only grown from about 21% in 2001. So it’s been largely stagnant — a number that we wanted to, in at least our small way, try to impact. The broader challenge obviously is the skills shortage in cybersecurity, which there’s no shortage of articles around. I think the more recent data suggesting 25 to 30,000 open positions in Canada, with that gap expected to hit somewhere around 100,000 by 2035. And globally it’s even more ridiculous — it’s 4.8 million, I think, is the current number.

So two major challenges that we have in our industry, but you bring up a good point. I think initially it was less about — I don’t think we were thinking that deep in terms of how does this impact channel, how could it impact channel. I would say we’re engaging our channel partners through the effort, and they’re really enjoying being part of the selection committee and those types of things. We’re seeing partners, as a result of their participation in the selection committee, starting to do their own version of this, which is great to see.

But I think you’re right. I think there’s probably an opportunity for us to evangelize the channel part of the opportunity from an employment perspective as we’re doing some of this effort, and it’s probably something that we can look to in the future. But holistically, the gap and the challenge in terms of women in tech as well as just the skills shortage affects both our partner community and our customer base as well. So yeah, I think you bring up a good point. There’s probably an opportunity for us to maybe use our exposure to the applicants to try to evangelize the channel a little bit more going forward.

Robert: Well, and it’s often a good entry point for folks just starting out in cybersecurity. I can tell you that every MSP I’m talking to, one of their biggest challenges — the biggest challenge — is hiring the right people, especially in security, for the numbers that you point out. And I think as you say, maybe there’s an opportunity for you guys too. I mean, I understand that the goal of the scholarship is to grow the overall pool and then the market sorts it out. But it does occur to me — the scholarship itself isn’t strictly limited to students who are purely full-time at a school. If I’m a solution provider who has a female employee who also happens to be upgrading her skills at college part-time, they could theoretically be pointing her toward this. Is that a use case you’ve seen or thought about?

Bob: We haven’t seen it in terms of — we tend to see more full-time students applying. We haven’t seen those returning to either enhance their current skills or — actually, we have seen some submissions from part-time students. So let me correct that. But specifically from channel, not to date.

But you do bring up a great point. It’s one that we — I think if we look to subsequent years, next year, to really promote both the channel to the applicants who may be applying, but also to the channel to solicit those that might want to consider applying for it. For those that are doing some reskilling on their part, there’s probably an opportunity for us to evolve that.

Again, like I said, the initiative has been more philanthropic than it’s been carved down into how do we use this as an opportunity to work with the channel more. But I think you bring up a great concept and idea and one that I certainly will take under advisement and work with the team on for next year. I think they’re great ideas. Again, it’s part of the evolution of how this thing has grown and how we think about it. I think there’s a good opportunity to start to look at it a little bit more strategically around how we work with and engage the channel and use it to promote the channel a little bit more.

Robert: And it’s not too late. To your listeners, if you’re listening to this and you have a woman working for you that fits in that category, nominations are open through — correct me if I’m wrong here Bob — April 8th?

Bob: April 8th is when those submissions close, correct. So there’s still time to get your submissions in. We’re starting to see them come in now. It’s interesting — we see a big spike in those that have initiated, and we tend to see those applications get submitted closer to the deadline. So it’s really something that people are spending a lot of time working on, which is great. And I would say we really focused a little bit more on the cybersecurity element, whereas initially it was a little bit broader, more sort of STEM, and now we’re really trying to focus in on those applicants that are showing a real proficiency or directive toward cybersecurity.

Robert: Makes sense, given both where you sit and the need, which we’ve talked about and which everyone listening to this is no doubt well acquainted with. You guys added the Future Leader tier in Canada last year — a $1,000 award alongside the $5,000 Trailblazer level. What was behind creating that second tier, and what have you learned about reaching people earlier in the pipeline as you’ve done this?

Bob: Yeah, so it’s again part of the evolution. We initially said $5,000 times one, then it was $5,000 times two, and even when we got to the $5,000 times two, the applicant pool was so strong that quite honestly our selection committee — and again, this is made up of directors and general managers and VPs from all sorts of business, large enterprise customers, partners, other technology-aligned partners — they really just struggled with how do we pick just two. So we said, okay, well, what can we maybe do in terms of evolving the program?

That’s when we made the decision last year to offer five $1,000 bursaries. But as we pivoted back to this year, we pulled that back a little bit and went to three $5,000 scholarships, as opposed to the five $1,000 bursaries. Part of our thinking was we wanted it to be more impactful, even if it meant fewer people, and given just the cost of education and what’s happening today, it just felt like it was more relevant to offer $5,000 times three versus the additional $1,000 bursaries.

So that’s where we’re at today, and I think directionally that’s likely where it’ll continue to go. In terms of the stats from North America, there will be a total of $35,000 given this year — $20,000 in the US and $15,000 in Canada. And since inception for North America, there’s been over $187,000 awarded to 39 women. So we’re excited to evolve this. I think we’re tweaking it for the right reasons, and we’ll continue to tweak it. Some of the recommendations you made for going forward, I think, are certainly ones we want to take advantage of as well.

Robert: I love those relative American-to-Canadian numbers, given that we’re so used to either multiplying or dividing by 10 depending on which way you’re going. To see it so close to parity given market sizes, that’s a great sign. The Alumni Club is relatively new. What’s the vision there — is that mainly a networking thing for recipients, or are you trying to build something more structured that connects those folks to the industry longer term?

Bob: Yeah, I think it’s a bit of both. We first of all wanted to make sure that we have methods to maintain relationships with these folks, and to see where they end up and how they evolve, and to continue to be a support mechanism for them as they look to build their careers in this industry. So it really created that tether for us to keep in contact with them, which is great, and to continue to offer them some opportunity for mentorship.

We see a lot of students nowadays open to the idea of moving and traveling and seeing the world and maybe working in different locations. And because we’re global and we’re seeing more and more of our regions participate in it, there’s that opportunity for us to potentially help them in terms of building their career.

What we wanted to create was long-lasting relationships with our recipients, and not just hand them an award and bid them adieu and wish them all the best. So I think this is just another evolution, in part of the program, as well as the adoption. Like I said, we’re in seven countries now, and we continue to see countries added every year. We’re excited to be able to offer it, and like anything else, it’s just continuing to make sure that they’re aware it exists and that we encourage them to take advantage of it.

Robert: ESET picked up the CRN Gender Parity Award last year. How do you think about whether vendor-side diversity commitments actually translate out into the partner ecosystem? Is that connection real now, or is that still sort of aspirational?

Bob: That’s a great question, and I guess it’s going to be a little bit more opinion-based. But I do think the latter is true — I do think you’re starting to see some really good movement in the positive direction across both channel and vendor communities. Certainly when you look at where the gaps would have been in terms of women representation in our organization, we’re pretty proud of our mix. And the more that we engage, the more that we work with our partners, the more that we solicit folks to be part of even our selection committee — it’s surprising how many women are starting to hold higher positions within both our partner communities and within our commercial customers. So that’s great to see, and it’s great to see how excited they are to participate in a venture like this to try to continue to encourage that statistic to change.

Robert: My last question. If an MSP or other partner came to you and said, “I want to hire more women into security roles, but I don’t know where to start,” what would you tell them?

Bob: Well, first of all, I would probably say I don’t think it’s as difficult as it might appear to be. I think if you’ve constantly landed at that decision, that you want to try to do that, I think there’s enough opportunity to go and find those folks for those types of roles. I just think you need to decide that that’s something you want to address. When it’s just sort of passive, it may be a little bit more difficult to do if you’re just kind of waiting for it. But we’re happy to put them in touch with — there’s several organizations, there’s events happening now, even in Canada and Toronto and in the US, that are really communities based on women in cybersecurity. There’s a growing number of them. I think attending those, or being part of those, or reaching out to those communities is a great way to find good talent that’s really proactively working at their career in cybersecurity.

Robert: Some good advice there, and good luck finding those lucky winners for this year when those nominations close in just a little bit. Bob, thanks for taking the time.

Bob: Appreciated, as always. We look forward to seeing what the applicant pool looks like this year, and certainly going through the applications and reading what they have to say and what their submissions are. It’s a great part of what we do. We enjoy it every year, and we look forward to the event when we get to invite them and hand them the big novelty check at the end. The novelty check is always a fun time.

Robert: Yeah, for sure. Thanks so much.

There you have it, Bob Bonneau from ESET Canada. I’d like to thank Bob for his time and for being genuinely open about where the program is and where it could go. It’s not every day that a vendor admits on tape they haven’t fully connected a talent initiative to their channel and then commits to thinking about it differently.

A couple of things I want you to take away from this. First, the obvious one: if you know a woman in Canada who’s enrolled in college or university and has an interest in cybersecurity, point her toward the ESET Women in Cybersecurity Scholarship. Applications close April 8th — we’ll have a link in the show notes. And that includes women who might already be working in the channel and upgrading their skills part-time. There’s nothing that says this is only for traditional full-time students.

Second, and maybe more importantly: Bob’s comment about retention — that the second someone updates their LinkedIn with cybersecurity experience, the recruiters come calling — that should land for every MSP owner listening. You’re not just competing to hire these people. You’re competing to keep them. And if you’re not thinking about what makes your shop attractive to a 21-year-old with security skills and options, someone else is.

Thanks for listening. You can find In The Channel on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, and most podcast directories. If you’re finding the show useful, a rating or review goes a long way. Until next time, I’m Robert Dutt for ChannelBuzz.ca, and I’ll see you in the channel.

Hello and welcome to In Case You Missed It from ChannelBuzz.ca. I’m Robert Dutt, editor of ChannelBuzz.ca, and this is your weekly look at the stories that matter for the Canadian IT channel community. March 30th, 2026.

Four stories this week. A Sherbrooke cloud distributor goes global after 28 years of bootstrapping. Broadcom’s VMware reckoning arrives just in time for a March 31st deadline. Intel and AMD both signal price increases that will squeeze your clients’ hardware refreshes. And two independent reports paint the same uncomfortable picture about where enterprise AI adoption actually stands.

Let’s get into it.

We’re starting this week with a feel-good Canadian story, and it’s a big one.

Sherweb, the Sherbrooke, Quebec-based cloud marketplace distributor, has secured a $125 million minority equity investment from Investissement Quebec. And here’s the detail that makes this significant: this is Sherweb’s first outside investment ever. The company has been bootstrapped and founder-owned since 1998. Twenty-eight years without a dollar of outside capital.

This comes on the heels of Sherweb’s expansion into the UK market, where they’re targeting over 11,000 MSPs. That move was built on their acquisition last year of Irish cloud distributor MicroWarehouse, so they’re not just parachuting in — they’ve got a beachhead.

Put those two announcements together and the picture is clear. This isn’t a company raising money because it needs to. This is a company that’s been profitable for nearly three decades, deciding it’s time to go global, and bringing in a strategic partner to fund the expansion and, notably, M&A.

CRN’s interview with Sherweb’s co-CEO made the ambitions explicit: AI marketplace expansion and acquisitions are on the table. For Canadian partners, this is worth watching. Sherweb has been a reliable, partner-first distributor for a long time. The question now is whether they can scale that model internationally without losing what made it work.

Now for a very different kind of story. The Broadcom VMware saga has been building for months, and this week several threads converge at once.

March 31st is the deadline for Broadcom’s termination of the VMware Cloud Service Provider program in Europe. CISPE, the European cloud infrastructure providers group, filed a formal antitrust complaint with the European Commission on March 19th, calling Broadcom’s actions — and I’m quoting here — a “death sentence” for smaller cloud providers. They’re asking for interim measures to block the shutdown while the complaint is investigated.

Broadcom’s response, per CRN, was that they “strongly disagree” and that the complaint “misrepresents the realities of the market.”

Meanwhile, Broadcom is making a very specific pitch to customers. Krish Prasad, who heads the VMware Cloud Foundation division, told CRN — and again, direct quote — “We have essentially solved the hardware shortage and the hardware cost issues with a software solution.” The argument is that VCF 9.0’s advanced memory tiering lets you offload expensive DRAM to cheaper NVMe storage, so the memory super-cycle becomes a reason to buy more VMware, not less. Prasad called it a “huge VCF tailwind.”

Here’s the irony, and it’s hard to miss. Broadcom is simultaneously telling customers they need VMware more than ever to survive the hardware crunch, while pushing licensing and program changes that are driving those same customers to look for alternatives.

And the data on customer sentiment is now documented. Independent analyst firm Virtified, founded by former Gartner VP Michael Warrilow, surveyed 450 VMware users across 14 countries and found roughly half plan to reduce their VMware usage by 2028.

That’s not channel chatter. That’s documented customer intent. Whether the EU complaint gains traction or not, the market is speaking.

Speaking of hardware getting more expensive — let’s talk silicon.

Intel had an interesting week. Their VP David Feng told CRN that the new Core Ultra Series 3 “Panther Lake” chips will help Intel regain market share in commercial PCs. The pitch: Panther Lake brings meaningful AI processing capabilities to the commercial fleet. This is Intel’s play to win back ground they’ve lost to AMD and Apple Silicon in the enterprise.

On the other hand — and this is from the same executive, same week — Intel confirmed it’s raising CPU prices for OEMs by roughly ten percent. Supply crunch, rising component costs, tariff pressure. The usual 2026 cocktail.

So Intel is counting on a commercial PC refresh cycle to reclaim market share, while simultaneously making that refresh more expensive for everyone involved.

And lest you think this is Intel-specific — AMD is also signaling GPU price increases of at least ten percent in 2026, driven by the same DRAM supply crisis.

For partners helping clients plan hardware refreshes right now, the message is straightforward: budget accordingly, and budget up. The cost pressure is structural, not temporary.

We’ll close this week with some data, and it tells a story every MSP needs to hear.

Auvik released their 2026 IT Trends Report this week. The headline finding: sixty-seven percent of IT professionals are optimistic about AI. But only five percent say AI is actually core to their operations today. Five percent. That is an enormous gap between enthusiasm and reality.

The governance picture is even more striking. Seventy-six percent of IT leaders believe their organization has an AI policy. Only forty-two percent of help desk staff agree. That’s not a gap, that’s leadership and the front line living in completely different realities about whether the rules even exist. Auvik also found that 61 percent of organizations discover unauthorized SaaS applications at least monthly. Shadow IT is not a hypothetical — it’s a standing Tuesday meeting.

And these findings aren’t isolated. The same week, Waterloo-based OpenText released a Ponemon Institute study of nearly 1,900 IT and security practitioners. Fifty-two percent of enterprises have deployed GenAI. But seventy-nine percent haven’t reached full AI maturity in cybersecurity. Only 41 percent have AI-specific data privacy policies.

Two independent studies, same week, same conclusion: AI is being deployed faster than organizations can govern it, secure it, or even agree on whether governance exists.

For MSPs, this is the opportunity in neon lights. Your clients are adopting AI. They think they have policies. Their front-line staff disagrees. Someone needs to fill that gap.

That’s your In Case You Missed It for March 30th, 2026. Sherweb going global, Broadcom’s VMware reckoning, the silicon squeeze, and the AI governance gap — confirmed from two independent angles.

Links to everything we talked about today are in the show notes at ChannelBuzz.ca.

If you’re finding this useful, subscribe wherever you get your podcasts — Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, most directories. Ratings and reviews always help us out.

I’m Robert Dutt for ChannelBuzz.ca. I’ll see you in the channel.

Robert Dutt: Hello and welcome to In The Channel from ChannelBuzz.ca, bringing news and information to the Canadian IT channel community for the last 16 years. I’m Robert Dutt, editor of ChannelBuzz.ca and your host for the show.

This episode is a little different from what you’re used to hearing on In The Channel. It’s the first in what I’m hoping becomes an occasional series I’m calling “Life After the Channel” – conversations with people who built careers in the Canadian IT channel and then went on to do something completely different.

My guest today is Martin McNicoll. If you were in the NetSuite ecosystem in Canada at any point over the last two decades, you probably know Martin. He founded ERP Guru, which was later rebranded to Gurus Solutions, grew it into one of NetSuite’s top partners in the country, picked up every award in the book, and eventually sold the company in 2022. And then he went and did something that nobody saw coming. Martin’s now building a grain-to-bottle whisky distillery in the Eastern Townships of Quebec, growing his own organic barley and rye, aging his own barrels, and building a brand rooted in his family’s Scottish heritage going back to the 1700s. It’s a great story. So let’s get right into it, my chat with Martin McNicoll.

[MUSIC]

Robert: Martin, thanks for taking the time. Thanks for joining us.

Martin McNicoll: Robert, it’s great to be here with you today.

Robert: Nice to catch up. We ran into each other a lot at SuiteWorld. And for years, when I talked to Craig West about the channel in Canada for NetSuite, you guys would be one of the first names that came up. President’s Club, Five Star, the whole nine yards. And now you’re making whisky in the Eastern Townships. Walk me through that. How did we come to be where we’re at today?

Martin: Well, it’s a note on Craig. He was my RSM. He was the guy managing me and Gurus when you started. He wasn’t like head of the channel. He actually came down to Montreal to help me start the practice. So we connected for all that time.

But to go back to the whisky business, I’m a Scotch fan. I’m a whisky fan. And now, like eight years ago, for my 50th birthday, I went to Scotland with a bunch of friends and had a great time visiting distilleries for a full week, just drinking Scotch and having fun and eating good food.

And when we came back, a couple of years later, it was COVID. And COVID, I think, happened and a lot of people got ideas of what they really want to do. And I have a cottage in the Eastern Townships, which is, for your listeners, a bit up north of Vermont. I’m 15 minutes from Jay Peak, which is a ski resort in Vermont, on the Canada side. Beautiful place. And we stayed there for the first year of COVID.

We had amazing success with Gurus. I think for everybody in the channel, cloud services companies really boomed during that time. Everybody wanted to run their business from home. It was a great time. And I said, what can we do? We had supply chain issues our customers were trying to solve. And I said, what can I do? What can I contribute?

I started with ideas of being a farmer. These were shut down pretty fast. But a friend of mine said, you know what, we can grow barley and rye and we can make whisky. And I said, oh, that’s a great idea. And then the hunt was on. We found some land – I mean, that’s the only thing we could do during COVID, drive around and look for land – and found great land with a great combination of good water and enough acreage to grow the cereals. And it started like that.

And then a French company approached us to buy Gurus. And it was just the right timing. So everything happened. It just gave me more money to spend on booze, sort of saying.

Robert: As it should be. So to your point on that 2018 trip to Scotland, I read that the dream sort of began with a mission of bringing home a cask of whisky. Is that true?

Martin: It is true. We tried to, actually. When we went to the Balvenie and we said we’d like to buy one of your casks. And they looked at us like aliens. It’s like going to a Michelin restaurant and asking to buy the pan of the chef, right? Because the cask is part of the process. That’s what gives some of the aromas to the whisky. That’s where it’s aging. So you just can’t leave with the cask. You just can’t. I mean, I guess there were some barrel programs today, but you leave the cask there. You buy the liquid that’s in the cask, that’s all yours, but you can’t leave with the cask.

But that was funny. That led to very interesting conversations at the distilleries in Scotland. Crazy Canadians trying to buy a cask. That’s the IP. That’s the trade secrets of the industry.

Robert: So you had Gurus for 18 years, Alan Allman Associates comes knocking. You said initially you didn’t want to sell. What changed your mind? How much of it was about making room for the distillery that was already percolating in the back of your mind versus just feeling like it was the right time to do something new?

Martin: I mean, it was that. I wanted to dedicate more time, because at that point the guy running Gurus was my COO, Dominic, and he was doing a great job. I was taking more time off and giving him more bandwidth on the business to run it. And I wanted him to be the president and continue running it.

And these guys came in and they said, “We want to buy your company.” I said, “Okay, I’m not interested.” So they came back a couple times and the second time said, “Okay, how much do you want?” And I gave what I thought was a crazy number and they said yes. So I was done.

And today it’s one of the most profitable businesses they have in their portfolio, and they’ve added other ERPs to the mix buying other companies in North America. And for the French, Quebec and Canada is kind of the bridgehead to go to the rest of Canada and the US. They needed a company that can speak English, which Gurus dealt with very well all the time. Not all of them do. But it was great for them. A great acquisition on their side. I’m still sitting on their board in Montreal every quarter, so it keeps me connected to the business, having fun there and very proud to see the company continue to thrive.

Robert: You guys built Gurus through a string of acquisitions – Enabled Success, NetStra, MD Technical Resources. You had offices from Montreal to Chicago. When you look at what you’re doing now with the distillery – buying land, building infrastructure, hiring a master distiller – does it feel like it’s the same muscles that you built in building up Gurus, or is it completely different?

Martin: It is the same thing. That’s very funny. I thought it would be something else. It’s not. It’s just managing people, managing providers. I mean, the problems are different – it’s like a truck being stuck emptying a cargo of casks going to the distillery, or a pump that is broken. But it’s like following up with the providers, finding the right partners, researching, researching, researching, reading.

And all the skills that I’ve developed in BI and everything that we’ve built with Gurus is fully applied here at the distillery. So I started with cloud solutions first, and we’re using all the Google stack, which I always used, with their Google Cloud. All the data of the distillery is stored in a Google Cloud database and we can do analysis. It’s just great to look at it from a data perspective and have the right people to do the job. And I recognize what I’m good at and what I’m not good at. So I break stuff sometimes. That keeps me away from some pieces of equipment.

Robert: One thing that jumped out on the website for the distillery was the grain-to-bottle concept. You grow the grain, you distill it, you age it, you sell it. You control the whole chain. For 20 years you kind of sat as the middleman doing the consulting and implementation in between NetSuite and the customer. Was it something about that experience that made you want to own the whole thing this time around?

Martin: Definitely. And as you know, Robert, in the ERP channel, it’s not your software, it’s NetSuite. And my team understood the software, and the best successes we had were when we found a customer, sold NetSuite, understood the requirements, gave them a realistic estimate, implemented, and took them live with the right time frame. So that to me was like the perfect – everything that would work great, boom, boom, boom. We sold, we implemented, we took them live, converted all their data. Happy customers stayed with us for years.

And that was a bit of that, right? Where the channel model is changing – like the Salesforce model, even NetSuite is changing where there’s more of a side where you need to work with a direct sales team, which by definition have different objectives. Their objective is to sell the software for as much as possible. As for a partner, when you do the implementation, there’s a lot in it for you also in year two and year three. So you want the whole thing to go as smooth as possible. Different pros and cons there.

And I think that was definitely an inspiration in owning the whole supply chain and making the product. And even then, I need to buy bottles from China.

Robert: Yeah, it’s the classic case study, right? If one person could make a nail, it would be completely impossible to gather all the skills you would need to go from getting the metal out of the earth to producing a nail, much less a bottle of whisky, much less enterprise ERP.

The distillery website says patience is part of your essence, and whisky obviously is a product that has to age for years before you can sell a bottle. In the channel, again to the contrast you were just describing, everything’s about this quarter’s numbers, this year’s President’s Club. It’s fast, it’s iterative, things change very quickly, new features are added rapidly. How do you retrain your brain from SaaS speed to whisky speed?

Martin: I’m still impatient. But you know what, you go out in the field. And in the last couple years we had a lot of rain. And we had issues with weeds going into our fields, because we took fields that were used for hay to give to cows. So there’s a lot of seeds that you need to take out of that land. And we’re doing it with regenerative agriculture techniques, where we don’t use Roundup, we don’t use chemicals.

And sometimes you just sit there and you prepare the soil and then you go into the field and you make it super nice and you plant. And then two weeks later it’s full of weeds. Like hectares of weeds just popping up on top of your barley. And you’re like, yeah, what are you going to do? You try, you go in there first and you try to pull them out, and then you realize the scale of this. It’s impossible, right?

So patience is pushed on you, I would say, in agriculture. And for the whisky, I mean, we’re tasting it. I love whisky. And we have now barrels that are one year old. And these are rye – rye is something that grows very fast, very high, super easy. It’s like a weed in itself if you talk to the farmers. So we had a great crop of rye and we made our first rye last year.

So we were opening up that cask and tasting it now, and it is great. But you can taste after one year the immaturity of the whisky. So I think you have to trust your taste buds and say, okay, this is great. There’s something nice, nice colour, this is the direction I want it to take. But it’s not ready. So you sit on it, you put the cork on top of it, hammer it down, and then just wait again.

And I’m telling people, when is it ready? It’s going to be ready when it’s ready. It’s going to be great.

Robert: Can’t rush it. You’re working 60 acres of organic grain, you’re building your rickhouse, you’re hiring a master distiller, you’re planning a tasting centre. This doesn’t sound like a hobby thing for retirement. This is a full second career. Do you find you’re working harder now than you were when you were running Gurus?

Martin: Definitely. Because at the end, when you build a business, you assemble a team and people know what to do. You’ve got a PMO office, a back office, and a marketing team. And now you’re alone. So I’m like, can I get some help here? I have nobody. So you’re back into entering data in QuickBooks. No, I’ve solved that, I delegated that. But it’s tough.

And the problem is, when I sold the business, I told my wife I’m retiring. And she said, yeah, yeah, you’re retiring. But I didn’t think, and she didn’t think, it would be this intense in terms of running it. And you’re fighting against all the bureaucracy and you have to understand all the rules, environmental rules. And you have to understand, to be a farmer, you have to apply for a permit to be a farmer. So what’s your background, sir? Well, I’m a software engineer. So really, good thing. Do you know about farming? Absolutely not. Okay, what are you going to do about it? Well, I’m going to hire someone. Who is it? I don’t know. Well, you need to get the licence first.

So no, I found someone actually that really helped me and was working in the prairies in Saskatchewan for more than 10 years, working with cereals there. So it’s assembling a team, making it work together, putting all the resources in place so they can succeed. It’s the same thing.

What I like is the manual labour, which you don’t get in tech. I’ve lost some weight. So that’s good, being out there and working with the equipment.

One of the projects we’re working on now – for your listeners, we’re in March and mid-March in Quebec, it’s still very cold, it’s like minus 15 Celsius – so it’s the last time we’ll be able to go in the forest. And what we’re doing is harvesting some trees to plant oak trees. We’re introducing Quercus alba, which is the American oak, into our forest, because we have more forest than we have land. And the goal would be in, I don’t know, 30 years – I won’t be there – to make some barrels, maybe. So again, in that supply chain of getting there. But there’s no more oak in the area. It was all cut down for the lumber industry. So we’re replanting. That’s one of the side projects.

So we’re going to go out with the equipment on Friday and go in the woods and cut some trees. That’s something I didn’t used to do. And that’s what my job involves now. A chainsaw. I’m happy.

Robert: This is what you get to invent for yourself. And if you’re happy, that’s brilliant.

You’re making three types of whisky as I understand it – a single malt, you touched on the rye, and a Canadian bourbon, which is not a concept I’d heard before. Very interesting. I enjoy a whisky, I am not a well-educated drinker. But for those who are listening, what’s the vision of the distillery? What are you going for with the whisky products?

Martin: So we’re looking to develop high-end whisky. We’re talking about $100 bottles. So it really needs to be fine-tuned to the taste of the different products that you build.

When you talk about rye whisky, it’s mainly – the cereal has to be rye. Single malt is just barley. And when you talk about bourbon, or if you talk about bourbon in Kentucky, it’s mainly based out of corn. So we have corn also on the land and we’ve added some wheat that we’ve tried.

It’s a mix of different – they call it a mash bill. So our mash bill, the cereals that get taken into the equipment for the mash to create a beer. We make a beer, then we distill that beer and that’s the whisky at the end. The big difference is the cereals.

So that batch we had, I think it was two years ago, big winter, and we couldn’t get the rye out of our silos because of the amount of snow and ice that was out there. So we said, hey, we have some corn there. Why don’t we make some – it’s all Canadian whisky, right? If you look at the official denomination, it’s Canadian whisky. Don’t confuse marketing with the real stuff. But it’s a mash bill that involves more than 50% corn. In this one I think it’s 65% corn. And it has that – you’ll recognize it if you’re a bourbon drinker – that very sweet, mellow taste of corn that you get into the whisky. That’s what you get from bourbon. So that’s what we’re making with that corn.

Robert: I look forward to trying that, actually. Hopefully someday.

On your website, I love the clan story – the McNicoll ancestors coming over with the 78th Fraser’s Highlanders in 1757, fighting at Louisbourg and Quebec, settling in La Malbaie. And now you’re bringing that Scottish whisky tradition back to Quebec soil. How much of this, as well as the ability to play with the chainsaw and hopefully bring in some casks, how much of this is about honouring that heritage?

Martin: Well, that was a big part. When I started to enjoy more whisky and go back to Scotland, I went back to the land of my ancestors. So that was Portree, close to the Isle of Skye. And there’s another area also, another region, that there’s two big areas that the McNicoll clan were. So I got to visit that.

That was always part of the story. And then as I was publishing some of my content on Scotland, a professor from a university here in the Eastern Townships contacted me. He said, you know, I wrote a book on the McNicoll clan, the whole story. So we started to talk and that became a very nice collaboration between him and the distillery to tell more of the story, to the point where we decided to call the whisky McNicoll. So the whiskies are going to be called McNicoll, with the different types of whisky we’re going to sell.

The brand itself is my last name, which is an honour to this Scot who came to America, really, because they fought down, they went down to New York with the 78th, and the original dude came back north. And my mother has French ancestry – she’s a Chevalier, she’s French, French, French – and then Scottish, Scottish, Scottish. And then there’s a mix. You can see there’s a mix in between those two. And you look at the genealogy, and that professor went back and he found all the ancestors and all the churches here in Quebec and went down to New York, went to Scotland to find all the origins. Very interesting to see the different clans and the French into making our population today.

Robert: Very cool. You touched a little earlier on the bureaucracy and that kind of fun. You went through an interesting fight with Quebec’s Agricultural Land Protection Commission to get permission to build a distillery on farmland. Without getting too deep into the legal weeds, what was that like? And is that a challenge other people thinking about agritourism or value-added agriculture should be ready for?

Martin: Definitely. And doing business in anything that involves food – there are some guidelines and some rules of law that you need to follow, which is, I would say, much harder than to open a NetSuite provider or a NetSuite partner licence. I had offices all across the US and also in the rest of Canada. It was 100 times easier to open an office in California than to start an agri business in Quebec, or even I would say Canada. Some provinces are easier than Quebec, but it was always a challenge.

But I knew I was right. So one thing you learn is that you surround yourself with great people. My lawyers – that’s the thing you can do when you have money, you just lawyer up. But they were great at understanding everything that was going on. I found the expert and this woman knew exactly what was happening. She found some other people that were able to go through it. And we just had to go through all the legwork and convince the commission that what we’re doing is okay. And here’s why.

But it’s a process and it’s frustrating because you’re there and you want to do this project. And you’re like, I’m going to be environmentally friendly. I’m going to do this from the grain to the bottle. I want to do all those different things. And then you see all those obstacles. But I think it’s part of the challenge, going through them and winning. At the end, I won. So that’s what counts.

Robert: It is exactly what counts. So if someone in the channel who’s in a place that you were at when you were with Gurus is listening to this and thinking, I’d love to do something like that someday – not necessarily to be a competitor to you, but to sell the practice, go off and do something completely different, that’s their dream – what would you tell them, having gone through this process as far as you have now?

Martin: I think the fact that they have done it before – starting a consulting firm and running it and dealing with customers – they’ve built their knowledge and their expertise and their resilience into doing anything else. I would always say that implementing an ERP system is the Formula One of computer science, because you have so much complexity. And if you fail, the company can die. They will not operate. Products will not ship. Invoices will not go out. You can cripple a business by doing a wrong implementation.

So I would say you’re really prepared to do anything, in my mind, after the channel, after running that type of business. I think it’s just to look at what you like to do and what’s your ambition and take it head on.

Robert: Good advice. Good advice from someone who has done it and is doing it. And my last and no doubt most important question – when do we get to actually taste the whisky? When do you get to market with your products?

Martin: At least two years. So to be whisky, to be called whisky, it needs to be three years in a cask, in an oak cask. And for us, we just reached our first anniversary in December. So we still have a good two years to go. And we have to decide if we are going to put it in a bottle or not. We’re going to taste it and say, is it ready or not? And if not, I’m just going to sit on it again.

However, we’re coming out with a liqueur that we’re making. It’s a butterscotch liqueur that our master distiller has been developing. And he’s working also on another liqueur that we want to put out, and we’re going to sell locally. Just to get some things out of the distillery with a Scottish-type accent.

Our master distiller has also some Scottish ancestry. He went to school at Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh to learn about the trade. So he’s got all those ancient recipes of Scottish liqueurs. We’re pulling out of that book to create some interesting products. So that should come in a couple of months, hopefully, if I can get my bottles from China.

Robert: Fascinating stuff. Good luck. It’s been very interesting catching up and it’s always fascinating to hear about the journeys of folks who’ve made a career in the channel and see what they’re doing afterwards. All the best with getting that liqueur out, and the longer term getting those three whiskies out the door.

Martin: Thank you, Robert.

Robert: There you have it – Martin McNicoll, formerly of Gurus Solutions, currently of Distillerie des Cantons de l’Est.

I’d like to thank Martin for his time and honestly for his openness. It’s not every day that someone walks you through what it’s actually like to trade quarterly SaaS targets for fields of organic barley and barrels that won’t be ready for three years.

A couple things that stuck out for me in this conversation. First, the idea that the same muscles that Martin built running a channel business – the acquisitions, the growth planning, the systems thinking – are the same muscles he’s using to build the distillery. Different industry, same instincts. I think anyone running a channel practice will recognize themselves in that.

And second, the patience piece. Martin talked about planting trees today for barrels he won’t use for 30 years. That’s a fundamentally different relationship with time than most of us have in the tech world. And I think that’s something worth sitting with.

If you want to learn more about what Martin’s building, you can find the distillery at distilleriedescantons.ca, and we’ll have a link for that in the show notes. Keep an eye out for the butterscotch liqueur, which should be available before the whisky is.

If you enjoyed the episode, do me a favour – follow or subscribe wherever you’re listening, whether it’s Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, wherever else you find your podcasts. And if you’re feeling generous, a rating or review goes a long way for a small show like ours.

Until next time, I’m Robert Dutt for ChannelBuzz.ca, and I’ll see you in the channel.

Robert Dutt: Hello and welcome to In The Channel from ChannelBuzz.ca, bringing news and information to the Canadian IT channel community for the last 16 years. I’m Robert Dutt, editor of ChannelBuzz.ca, and as always, your host for the show.

On Cisco’s most recent earnings call, CEO Chuck Robbins called the campus and data centre refresh the top of the first inning of a multi-year, multi-billion dollar opportunity. Double-digit growth in networking, six consecutive quarters. But that’s the global picture. What does the first inning look like in Canada?

My guest today is Erin Gertner, VP of the Partner Organization and SMB Sales for Cisco Canada. Erin sees what she calls a “perfect storm” converging right now – a massive wave of aging infrastructure hitting last day of support, growing urgency around AI readiness, and increasing pressure around data sovereignty. We get into what Cisco Canada is seeing on the ground, where partners are finding the most traction, and what separates the ones winning those deals from the ones leaving the door open for somebody else.

Let’s get right into it. My chat with Erin Gertner.

Erin, thanks for taking the time. I appreciate it.

Erin Gertner: Thank you so much, and thank you for having me, Robert. It’s nice to see you.

Robert Dutt: Nice to see you as well. It’s been a little while since Partner Summit when last we sat down, but I wanted to chat because of Chuck’s comments on the earnings call, talking about the top of the first inning on a multi-year, multi-billion dollar opportunity around campus refresh. Double-digit growth in networking for six consecutive quarters. That’s the global picture. I guess to throw it open, what does that top of the first inning look like from where Cisco Canada sits? Are we tracking with the US on this one? Are we still back in spring training? What does the Canadian opportunity look like in this moment?

Erin Gertner: I think we’re seeing something very similar to what Chuck spoke about on the earnings call. We are seeing a multi-year, multi-billion dollar refresh cycle taking place here in Canada. And I think it is the perfect storm of three things coming together.

One, we have a lot of aged infrastructure out there. Sometimes we call it last day of support, or LDOS. When we look in our portfolio, we’ve got the largest LDOS opportunity that we’ve had in many, many years this year and next year. We’ve been working with many of our partners as well as our account teams to start going out and pursuing those opportunities because we really do need to get in front of them.

But we’re also seeing the dynamics of a few other things taking place. One is AI readiness. I think you probably heard in our earnings call, Chuck talk about the success that we’re having in AI. A lot of that today is really centred in the world of the hyperscalers. In our last earnings call, I talked about doing over $2 billion worth of infrastructure with the hyperscalers. So there’s this huge influx of demand around AI. But where we haven’t really scratched the surface is AI in the enterprise. The hyperscalers are very well prepared, but now we’re starting to see this big wave of enterprise deployment, or at least enterprises thinking about the use cases and the ROI, because it is a board-level conversation.

And then lastly, and this is probably a topic you hear a lot about working in Canada, is around digital resilience and data sovereignty. You need a modernized, secure network in order to deploy AI, and the network is more critical than it’s ever been as you think about the role it’s going to play in the next few years. The ability to fuse together security into the network is really unique and core for Cisco and driving refresh.

I often talk to partners about the LDOS opportunity, and we used to get the question a lot of, “Why would a customer upgrade?” or, “How do I have this conversation with a customer?” because their response is often, “It all still works. Why bother?” I think AI especially is really giving them that reason to modernize, because while their network may work, it wasn’t necessarily built to run the applications that they’re going to need today and in the future. So it’s a really compelling conversation, and we’re seeing huge uptake and demand in networking.

Robert Dutt: You touch on the customer size, especially on the AI side of things. Looking across the Canadian market in terms of customer size, vertical, geography – is the refresh opportunity relatively evenly distributed, or is it concentrated? Where’s the heat at right now?

Erin Gertner: It’s been interesting. All of our account teams, some of which are verticalized, others which are organized geographically, talk a lot about where they’re seeing refresh opportunity.

A great example is what we’re hearing from financial services organizations. We had that long period of COVID, and then there’s been a ton of conversation around return to office. Our financial services team will tell you that there’s massive demand because if you listen to what the banks or insurance companies are doing, they’re asking people to come back to the office. Those networks, many of which were built in 2018 or 2019, can’t support the applications that are being driven in today’s world. They can’t even support the number of people they have anymore. [A lot of those organizations saw a boom.]

So there’s a huge network refresh taking place right now in that specific vertical. We’re also hearing a lot about mission-critical verticals like healthcare, where uptime is hugely important and security and resilience are top of mind. But it’s really spread throughout. Many companies had a long period of time where they spent a good majority of their budget on work from home and getting people set up for different use cases. Now that we’re living in this hybrid world, or a lot of organizations are back to work, that’s putting a huge change in demand on what is being asked from the network, plus everything that’s happened from the AI perspective.

Robert Dutt: You bring in a lot of different threads in terms of things that are driving this – AI readiness at the top of the list, aging infrastructure, data sovereignty, security modernization, probably a few more. What’s actually leading the charge in this moment for the conversations you’re having with Canadian partners and customers? I’m curious if one of those things is the leader and the others follow, or if there’s really a convergence where this is a big pile of conversation topics at the same time.

Erin Gertner: I think it’s a big pile of conversation topics at the same time, and it also depends on the partner you talk to and how they’re approaching a customer. Every partner has got a really interesting and different approach, especially when it comes to AI, and I love that about our partner community.

A lot of them are taking, for example, an advisory services-led approach, or they’re taking the approach of – I hate this expression, but it’s one that makes sense – eating your own dog food. I was with a partner last week and they were talking about a lot of the work that they had done to embed AI into their own workflows. Then they were taking their success out into the market and starting new conversations with customers they hadn’t historically had access to. All of that was leading to a network refresh conversation, because customers are excited about the opportunity with AI, and then the partner was able to embed the question around, “Well, are you ready? Do you have the right infrastructure in place?”

The conversation often is bigger than that, and obviously security is a huge area of concern when it comes to AI. I think that’s where Cisco is very uniquely positioned to win in this space. We’re seeing a lot of our competitors try to bring network and security together, and we’re really the only organization who can truly embed network and security together and then traverse it from the campus to the data centre.

Robert Dutt: To your point on dog food, I learned from a partner years ago that the way to phrase it is “drinking one’s own champagne.”

Erin Gertner: Oh, I like that expression a lot better. Thank you for that.

Robert Dutt: Let’s talk about the AI side of things. Cisco’s own AI Readiness Index showed that 7% of Canadian organizations feel they’re fully prepared to deploy AI, and that’s actually down a couple of points from 9% in 2024. 96% say it’s more urgent than ever. That’s a pretty big gap. How’s that tension showing up in the conversations that partners are having with their customers?

Erin Gertner: I’ve spoken to a lot of partners in the last little while, and again, each are taking a very individual approach. I think leading with outcomes and that consultative mindset – and it looks very different for each partner – but they’re all trying to understand what outcome a customer is trying to deliver, or what is the ROI, or what is that metric that’s going to help move a CEO’s agenda forward, or help them understand how they can build a true business case to build out a full AI deployment.

It’s hard, right? We’re going through our own transformation at Cisco. We’ve got a team of individuals who work with us internally building out our AI workflows, and even on my own team, we’re trying to do all these things to help our team adopt AI tools to make their lives easier and more efficient. You often hear that somebody’s job is not going to be taken by AI – it’ll be taken by somebody who knows how to use AI. It is even more critical than ever that organizations figure it out.

A lot of our partners have deployed some interesting things for themselves or worked through really interesting consulting engagements where they have use cases they can take out to market and help customers build that business case for themselves. They need to start small, they need to define what success looks like, and I think many customers have a long road there, but there’s certainly hope that we’re headed in the right direction.

Robert Dutt: Raj, the president of Cisco Canada, wrote an op-ed recently saying that Canadian businesses risk – I think the quote was – “Blockbuster-style failure” without having the right AI infrastructure. For a partner who’s sitting across the table from a customer who feels that urgency but hasn’t really started yet, what do you counsel that partner to advise the customer on? What’s the practical starting point? Where do you begin?

Erin Gertner: It’s tough. Again, it depends what type of customer they are and what their use case looks like. But I think for that customer, it’s really leaning back to outcomes – what is going to demonstrate success for that organization? The last thing you want anybody to do is go out and deploy an AI application and see absolutely no success out of it. That will move that executive’s agenda back probably a couple of years.

But we are also really encouraging partners to talk through: Are they ready? You can have the best use case out there, but do you have a good data strategy? Do you have a good security strategy? Have you thought about modernizing your network? Is sovereignty important to you? And if it is, do you want to start thinking about potentially building that on-prem, or taking a different approach than maybe what you have historically done, because there are new considerations being layered on top of all of that.

Robert Dutt: Talk to me about the Secure AI Factory side of things. Tim Coogan called it the partner opportunity of this year. I’m curious how that translates practically for Canadian partners. Is this a play mostly for the big SIs, or are you finding mid-market partners who are finding a role in the AI infrastructure buildout?

Erin Gertner: I think it’s a little bit of both. We’re having conversations around Secure AI Factory with some of our largest partners because it is really unique. Our relationship with NVIDIA is truly one of a kind, and we’re actually creating products together. I know everybody has done a great job of partnering with NVIDIA in the market, but our relationship with them is a little bit different.

What I love about the whole notion of Secure AI Factory is the fact that it’s everything built together. We make it really easy. We’ve pre-built all the CVDs. We’ve essentially created a blueprint for partners and customers to go out and deploy an entire AI pod. That includes everything from networking to servers to security to observability. We can even include storage, even though we don’t make it – we’ve got a bunch of great storage partners.

Is it going to work for a small customer being serviced by a small partner? Probably not. It might be outside the scope of what they’re doing. But for mid-sized customers who are running interesting workloads and they want them on-prem, and especially for bigger customers who want to scale and deploy really quickly, or partners who have a ton of depth and capability in that space, the Secure AI Factory is a great solution.

Robert Dutt: For a Canadian partner who’s looking at this refresh opportunity, where are you seeing the most traction in terms of the technology stack? Is it campus switching, data centre modernization, Wi-Fi, security? What’s the entry point that’s helping partners produce pipeline right now?

Erin Gertner: We’ve done a lot of work with partners. We’ve got a tool called PXP – I think you’ve probably had some exposure to it – but we’ve been doing quite a few workshops with our partners to help them understand where their opportunity is. PXP does a great job of being very data-rich and data-centric. As we go through the enablement with partners, it gives them a good sense of what their refresh opportunity looks like.

Then we are trying to make sure we enable them around the broader conversation. You don’t want to just be refreshing a switch for a switch. Our best partners are taking that data and – again, to your question, some partners, let’s say their history was really in the data centre – data centre networking is probably their biggest opportunity because that’s where they’ve sold the most in the past. For more broad-scale partners, it could be a combination of two or three different things.

What we’re really trying to coach them to do is take that opportunity and don’t refresh a switch for a switch. Help the customer understand what outcome they’re trying to achieve. Do they have the right security posture? What’s their Wi-Fi strategy? What’s their device strategy? We’re trying to help them take that data and broaden the conversation into something that’s more outcome-driven. Our best partners are doing an excellent job of that and building really big, interesting deals alongside their customers.

Robert Dutt: In doing that, when you’re looking at the services layer, are there any particular areas that you find are especially productive? Assessments, design, migration, managed services post-deployment – where are partners getting the most return from focusing their energy?

Erin Gertner: Consulting services has been a huge one. We’ve got a great assessment program and we have some partners who are doing a great job leveraging it and seeing a ton of success. I was in a partner QBR the other day and they were giving an example of having done a security assessment with a customer that significantly broadened the scope of the deal and helped the customer understand where they had some vulnerabilities in their current infrastructure. That deal almost quadrupled in size. Partners are doing a great job with that.

What we’re really trying to encourage partners to do is make sure we’ve got an adoption plan for every software deal out there upfront, because we want to make sure anything our customers buy from our partners, they have a great experience with. If they aren’t doing a good job of adopting that and showing value all the way throughout the chain, we’re not going to see a renewal at the end.

The other thing we’ve been talking a lot about with our leadership team is some of what’s happening in the industry right now with some of the shortages that are industry-wide. In COVID, we saw something similar happen – a lot of supply chain constraints. Then there was this really long ingest period that happened afterwards because customers just had so much technology. We are really encouraging our partners and our teams to make sure we’re leading with services, so there is an outcome attached to the end and there is a plan with the customer to consume the technology so they can get the most out of what they’ve bought from us.

Robert Dutt: We talked a little bit about the big guys, the SIs, and the opportunity around AI Factory. For the smaller partner, that long-tail 15-to-20-person MSP that’s living in Meraki and maybe doing some security, is this a real opportunity for them, or is this fundamentally a larger VAR and SI play? Where it is accessible to that SMB-focused partner, what does the on-ramp look like?

Erin Gertner: It’s absolutely accessible for that SMB partner. I also have the SMB part of our business, so this conversation is very close to my heart.

Given the IT skills shortage that is very dominant in the Canadian market, we are seeing a lot of customers who don’t want to manage their own network. As customers grow – let’s say they were a very small customer four or five years ago and they chose more of a consumer-grade solution at that time – as they want to move into a more enterprise-type solution with security and all the other bells and whistles embedded in it, a lot of those customers are choosing not to manage that themselves. But they want to be in the same place as their competitors, because the expectation is they grow and scale just as fast, probably faster in fact, as a big company.

A lot of those companies are born in the cloud, leveraging tons of cloud applications, so the way they create their foundation is even more critical than ever. We have a bunch of great small to mid-size partners who are doing awesome things in that space and growing pretty significantly, actually gaining a lot of market share because of their agility and their ability to manage something at a cost-effective price.

Robert Dutt: You mentioned the importance of data sovereignty in the conversation. The federal government has launched a call for proposals for sovereign AI data centres of over 100 megawatts, and we’ve seen Cohere get a lot of federal backing for their data centre build. Is data sovereignty a driver in this enterprise refresh, or is it a parallel conversation that’s happening at the same time?

Erin Gertner: I think it’s a bit of a parallel conversation, but it’s certainly driving a huge – not even refresh – just huge modernization effort. A lot of it is centred around Canadian organizations who are worried about data sovereignty, or who are worried that sovereignty requirements might hit them in the next few years. They’re trying to prepare themselves by building out new types of data centres on-premise – new data centres to support applications coming back on-prem.

While maybe they haven’t built everything on-prem today, we are seeing a massive surge in companies starting to think about what that might look like. For customers who had almost all of their applications in the cloud previously, their data centre network didn’t necessarily support the low-latency, really high-bandwidth requirements that would come into play if they start putting mission-critical applications back on-prem.

We are seeing a lot of customers starting to think about what they would need to build to support sovereignty requirements, or if they’re going to continue to live in a hybrid world – which, let’s be honest, the majority of Canadian organizations are probably going to live in that world, and that’s all good – the network they have today probably doesn’t support that in the way they’d like either.

Robert Dutt: Let’s talk about what you’re doing to support partners through this process. What are the incentives, enablement resources, the programs that are particularly relevant to Canadian partners who are looking at this opportunity and going after it?

Erin Gertner: I think we’ve been pretty declarative about wanting to be the critical infrastructure for the AI era. We’re doing a lot of enablement with our partners. We’ve aligned our incentives, both front-end and back-end, to this opportunity. We’re doing a lot of workshops to help our partners understand where those opportunities lie and help them understand how to go out and capture them.

We’ve also been running a lot of demand generation alongside our partners around our AI strategy, what that looks like, as well as showcasing the innovation that Jeetu has put forward in our portfolio around network and security coming together, because I do think it’s a great story and one that maybe not everybody knew. Some people probably think we’ve still got two different platforms with Catalyst and Meraki, where the truth is those have come together in the last year.

With our acquisition of Splunk, there’s a lot that’s been infused into the network. Jeetu has also done a fantastic job of creating a really innovative security portfolio, a lot of which is actually embedded into the network layer. So there’s been a lot of education that we’ve had to do with both our partners and our customers to make sure they’re able to go out and tell that story to the market. I think Tim Coogan said this best – our job is to create that innovation, and then our job is also to help enable our partners to go out and be an extension of our sales force and help them deliver value to customers based on that innovation.

Robert Dutt: What do you see as separating the partners who are winning these refresh deals from those who aren’t? What are the best partners doing differently?

Erin Gertner: Again, I think really leading with that outcomes-based conversation and not just doing a like-for-like refresh. The ones who are going out and really taking a consultative approach, they’re winning a lot more and they’re winning much larger deals. I was on with a partner yesterday who was showcasing some of the work they’d been doing around AI and sharing with us some of the success they had just recently had, and they’re winning amazing deals by taking a very consulting-led approach.

What we have seen in the past from certain partners is they go in and focus very much on that refresh opportunity, and then they almost leave the door open for another partner to come in and have a conversation around networking, observability, and all the other aspects around that critical infrastructure. So the best partners are the ones who are leading with the whole portfolio.

I know we’re going to talk about 360 as well, but we’re really trying to incentivize our partners to build a lot of skills and technical depth around our solutions, and the ones who are really good at being able to tell the story of how our whole portfolio comes together – that “One Cisco” story that we often talk about – they’re the ones who are winning the most.

Robert Dutt: If I’m a Canadian partner listening to this and I haven’t really started leaning into that refresh opportunity yet, what should I be doing about this on Monday morning when I show up to work? And looking further out, we’re in the top of the first – what do you see the second and third innings looking like here in Canada?

Erin Gertner: Firstly, reach out to us. However you engage with Cisco, whether it’s through one of our distributors – who are amazing and have access to all of our tools – or reach out to your partner account manager at Cisco. We can provide all the training required on how to have the right conversation, as well as access to all the data you need to help you figure out where you should start and which customers are due for a refresh or have a refresh opportunity in the next six months. We can make it really easy for our partners to know where to spend their time and get a pretty fruitful payoff, both on the front-end and the back-end with us.

What do I think the second and third innings might look like? I think we’re still really at the infancy of that. We’ve seen a few customers go down the refresh path – probably our largest customers have gone down the refresh path. Some of them have modernized networks or they’ve gotten to where they think they need to be to support AI applications. But I do think we’re going to see some of our smaller customers start to catch up.

I also think we’re still really at the infancy of the success of AI. We talk a lot about the role of agentic AI and how that’s going to proliferate through organizations in the future. I don’t know that many customers have figured that out yet today. There are some who are really at the edge of innovation and who’ve done an amazing job with that, but it isn’t mainstreamed yet. As agentic AI really starts to roll out, the demands on your network and the demands around security especially become even more complex and even more critical.

I think that’s going to be the next wave. A lot of companies have done a good job of finding one or two use cases, maybe small ones, that have delivered value for them in AI. But there are very few organizations – and we talked about it through the AI Readiness Index – very few organizations who have really found tremendous value from AI today, but they will in the future.

Robert Dutt: I think you’ve done a great job of setting up the game for Canadian partners here. Good luck with the rest of the ballgame, and thanks so much for taking the time.

Erin Gertner: Thank you.

Robert Dutt: There you have it, Erin Gertner from Cisco Canada. I’d like to thank Erin for her time on this one, and thank you for listening.

A couple of things that stood out to me. First, how strongly the consulting and assessment-led approach is paying off. Partners who are going in and helping customers understand the full picture – security, AI readiness, network modernization – aren’t just winning deals. They’re winning deals that are three and four times the size of a like-for-like refresh. And the other is something Erin said that I think is worth sitting with: there’s no AI without a network. Simple statement, but it reframes the entire refresh conversation for partners who aren’t sure where AI fits into what they do.

If you’re enjoying In The Channel, you can find us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, and most podcast directories. Follow, subscribe, leave a rating or a review if you’re feeling generous. It all helps.

Till next time, I’m Robert Dutt for ChannelBuzz.ca, and I’ll see you in the channel.

Hello and welcome to a special midweek edition of In Case You Missed It from ChannelBuzz.ca. I’m Robert Dutt, and this week, RSA Conference 2026 took over San Francisco’s Moscone Center. Hundreds of announcements, dozens of press releases, and a whole lot of noise. So we went through the pile and pulled out what we think actually matters for Canadian IT channel partners. Let’s get into it.

If there was one defining message from RSA this year, it’s this: the AI agents your clients are starting to deploy? They’re not just productivity tools. They’re a brand new attack surface, and the security industry just showed up with the first wave of answers.

Cisco made the biggest splash, extending their Zero Trust framework to treat AI agents as a new identity type. Their pitch: if an AI agent can browse, query, and act on behalf of a user, it needs the same visibility, access controls, and real-time monitoring as any human on the network.

CrowdStrike came in heavy across multiple days. Their Next-Gen SIEM now ingests Microsoft Defender for Endpoint telemetry with no Falcon sensor required — which is a big deal for MSPs managing mixed Microsoft environments. They also launched Shadow AI Discovery, which finds unauthorized AI applications running across client environments. If you’ve ever had to track down rogue SaaS subscriptions, imagine that problem, but with AI tools that can actually take actions on behalf of employees. CrowdStrike also introduced Agentic MDR — managed detection and response that operates at machine speed against AI-driven threats.

Proofpoint went after the same problem from the email and collaboration side, launching their AI Security platform and Agent Integrity Framework. Their angle: securing the “agentic workspace” where humans and AI agents are operating side by side across email, cloud, and collaboration tools like Teams and Slack.

And Black Duck brought their Signal platform to general availability — agentic application security designed specifically for AI-generated code. When your developers are using AI to write code, who’s checking the AI’s work? That’s the gap Signal is designed to close.

They weren’t alone. Arctic Wolf launched what they’re calling the world’s largest commercial agentic SOC. Darktrace rolled out a managed email security offering for MSSPs. Huntress expanded their identity threat detection to Google Workspace. The message from the industry was unanimous: agentic AI security is not a future problem. It’s a right-now problem.

If you’re advising clients on AI adoption, the security conversation just got significantly more complex. And that complexity is an opportunity — because your clients are going to need help navigating it.

RSA — the company, at their own conference — made two announcements that pulled in opposite directions, and that was the point. They launched ID Plus Sovereign Deployment — fully air-gapped, on-premises identity security for environments where cloud is not an option. Think regulated industries, government, anyone with serious data sovereignty requirements. For Canadian partners dealing with OSFI E-21 or federal procurement, that’s directly relevant.

At the same time, they announced an expanded Microsoft partnership around M365 E7 and passwordless authentication. So RSA is going both directions: as sovereign as you need on one end, as deeply cloud-integrated as you need on the other.

On the hardware side, Dell announced quantum-ready commercial PCs with post-quantum cryptography built into the firmware, AI-powered ransomware recovery for their PowerProtect line, and an extension of their managed detection and response service to cover AI data platforms like PowerScale. HP made a similar hardware security move from their own event in New York this week, launching TPM Guard to protect TPM-to-CPU communications from physical attacks. The common thread: the security conversation is moving below the operating system and into the silicon.

Two announcements that translate directly to partner economics.

Barracuda — a hundred percent channel company — advanced their BarracudaONE cybersecurity platform alongside updates to their Partner Success Program. Platform investment and partner investment at the same time. That’s the kind of announcement that tells you a vendor is serious about the relationship, not just the product.

And Sectigo launched a new partner platform built around the reality that SSL certificate lifespans that are already shrinking and headed to 47 days. When certificates need to be renewed every 47 days instead of every year, that’s either a massive headache or a recurring revenue opportunity. Sectigo is betting that partners who automate the process will turn a compliance burden into a managed service.

That’s RSA Conference 2026 through the Canadian channel lens. Agentic AI security dominated the conversation. Identity and hardware resilience matured. And a couple of vendors made moves that directly affect your bottom line. Links and details for everything we covered are in the show notes. We’ll be back on Monday with the regular edition of ICYMI. Until then, I’m Robert Dutt for ChannelBuzz.ca, and I’ll see you in the channel.

Robert Dutt: Hello and welcome to In The Channel from ChannelBuzz.ca, bringing news and information to the Canadian IT channel community for the last 16 years. I’m Robert Dutt, editor of ChannelBuzz.ca, and your host for the show.

My guest today is Rob Scott. Rob is the co-founder of Monjur and managing partner at Scott & Scott LLP, where he’s spent more than 27 years at the intersection of technology and law. His firm works with over a thousand managed service providers across North America on their contracts, and he recently launched Monjur Pilot, an AI-powered legal assistant built specifically for MSP contracting.

Now, I know what you’re probably thinking – contracts aren’t exactly the sexiest topic in the channel. But here’s the thing. Most MSPs, I think, know their contracts are out of date, and they also know that they should do something about it. They just don’t. And in a world where the threats are evolving, AI is changing the service landscape, and the regulatory environment, particularly here in Canada, keeps getting more complex, the gap between what your contracts say and what your business actually does is becoming a real liability. Rob has seen what happens when that gap catches up to you, and he’s got some very practical advice about what to do about it.

Let’s get right into it. My chat with Rob Scott.

Rob, thanks for taking the time. I appreciate it.

Rob Scott: Thank you for having me.

Robert Dutt: You’ve been working with MSPs on their contracts for, I think it’s over two decades. What’s the state of the contract stack for the average MSP in 2026, and how wide is the gap between what most MSPs are actually running on and what they should be running on?

Rob Scott: That’s a great question. When I look at contracts, I see three big areas of risk for MSPs. One is that their agreements don’t keep up with their services. In the MSP world, that means you’re offering compliance advisory services without proper compliance advisory contracts. We call that service attachment for managed compliance. You’re now working with clients in and around AI and AI products, which are using a pre-AI customer contract. These are the things that change with frequency in IT, and for MSPs, that means one area of contract protection – static agreements don’t fit with emerging service offerings like tech.

Sometimes their agreements don’t keep up with their services, and other times, their agreements are not reflected for trends in the marketplace or specific risks. For example, ransomware attacks or emerging cybersecurity risks. MSPs don’t frequently have, for example, very clear-cut exclusions from responsibility for the criminal acts of third parties. Similarly, their contracts don’t limit their liability for acts or omissions of vendors. We monitor the terms and conditions of over 1,200 vendors in the MSP channel, and our clients get their customers to sign a waiver for any acts or omissions of those third parties. That’s an area – what I call vendor risk – which many MSPs are exposed.

Then the third big category is regulatory risk, operating with customers in regulated markets without the appropriate data protection agreements and data processing agreements that are required by both international, federal, and state laws. Those are the areas where most MSPs have been underserved by traditional legal services, which have caused many to move in the direction of do-it-yourself, which has many exposing themselves to unsupervised LLMs. While contracting for MSPs is very complex, they really have not been well-served by traditional legal services.

Robert Dutt: The open LLMs is what keeps me up at night. Shadow AI is a concern for lawyers, or at least us, as much as it is for MSPs. Shadow AI in their customers’ organizations, us for different reasons. But the MSPs are faced with a challenging choice between choosing fast and inexpensive do-it-yourself legal protection that lacks accountability and supervision, or traditional legal services that can be slow, can be expensive, and can be out of touch with what MSPs do. Many of my clients have shared stories about interactions with lawyers, not fondly, in part because the lawyers had no clue what they did, and they felt like they were paying the legal fees to explain to the lawyers what an MSP does.

Rob Scott: And so it’s been a challenge for many MSPs to get legal protection that’s both fast, affordable, and offered by MSP-specific attorneys.

Robert Dutt: You touch on the problem of keeping up with technology trends. I’m thinking in broader terms than that. What about whole directions of risk, I guess I would say. The example I think of is we’re doing a lot of tracking of the trend of abuse of trust. Attackers not breaking in, but logging in through trusted identities, VPNs, software supply chain attacks, those kinds of things. Basically, when the threat itself has shifted so fundamentally, how far behind are most MSPs in terms of accounting for that in their contracts?

Rob Scott: I would say very far behind. I would say overall, the customers that we talk to, the people we meet, are either on some do-it-yourself approach that really hasn’t been updated by an experienced attorney, or hasn’t been updated recently to reflect the emerging threat landscape as you described it. But we’re constantly updating our agreements to properly reflect detailed terms and conditions about these emerging threats.

And I’ll give you an example. We have in our MSA a provision called security recommendations. And what that provision says is the MSP may from time to time give the customer recommendations about security compliance. For example, multi-factor authentication. And if the client does not accept or move forward with those proposals, anything that happens as a result that those things could have prevented is 100% on the customer – the MSP is off the hook.

And so when I think about emerging technology and the changing threat landscape, a lot of it has to do with how you manage the communications and the risk associated with that. And MSPs have had the hard choice in the past of having to either tell a client, “No, I’m not going to support you,” or, “Hey, I’m going to give you this waiver to sign.”

And this whole topic of declination of services around point solutions that deal with emerging threat factors has been a common issue with MSPs. They go to the customer. They’re like, “You’re exposed. You need these advanced security features.” I mean, there’s new stuff all the time, but right now, it’s a lot of focus on zero trust. And so it’s not inexpensive to implement a zero trust model within a business. And if an MSP wants to implement zero trust, the customer has to cooperate to buy those things. And the customer doesn’t understand them well enough to know what they do or why they need it. So their first reaction is to say, “No, it’s too expensive.” And that puts the MSP at risk, because I tell the MSPs, my opinion is their network is only as strong as its weakest link. So if you let these customers on that you know are overly risky, that puts the whole portfolio of customers at risk.

And that’s a lot of what you’re talking about with those threat vectors. Those threat actors are thriving on being patient. And it’s not just like, “Do we have guards at the front door?” It’s like, “We need guards in every room.” They’re already in. So that’s one of the things that I think most people think about. Cybersecurity is like hacking events or ransomware events, but so much more of it is they’re in your networks, they’re able to move around, they’re squirreling their way into different areas, and they’re being very patient waiting for that opportune moment. And so it’s not just about keeping people out, it’s also about catching them after they get in. And that’s where a lot of these emerging technologies and emerging threats are posing unique challenges from a cybersecurity perspective.

And the question is, “How are your agreements evolving?” And that’s where making sure that your vendors are all on there. So if there’s any act or omission of a vendor, that you can be covered for it. And the things that happen in cybersecurity, like criminal acts of third parties, is expressly excluded. I don’t think you need to go into as much of the specific threats. If you get a strong and enforceable exclusion against the criminal acts of third parties, almost every cybersecurity risk that would be impactful to an MSP is also a criminal act by the person who perpetrates it.

Robert Dutt: About a year ago, you did a piece around the theme of “Your MSA is broken and AI is to blame.” We’re a year further in, things have only accelerated. MSPs are selling Copilot bundles, offering AI-powered services. Their customers are deploying AI tools whether the MSP knows about it or not. From the customers’ point of view, how far behind are most MSP contracts relative to the AI services that they’re delivering or their customers are using today?

Rob Scott: We came out with a special service attachment for managed AI in 2024. And at that time, people said, “I don’t really need it. We don’t know what we’re doing yet.” Today, people come to Monjur just because of that attachment.

And the way that attachment is built is, number one, you don’t have the right definitions in your current agreement for things like AI input, AI output, the model, the trainings – all of these things that are relevant to AI that wouldn’t be in a master services agreement for managed services. Beyond that, you need your service descriptions. Is this AI readiness assessments? Is this app dev? Are we building RPA and automations? What is it exactly that the services entail? And so that’s a big part of it. And our structure is designed to cover just about every AI service that an MSP could do.

But it’s also important to make sure that you have the proper exclusions and client obligations. So when you think about exclusions, it’s like the MSP shouldn’t be responsible if the legal world changes and suddenly that client’s use becomes illegal. Think of helping customers deploy voice agents. And then it becomes clear that you can’t use a voice agent to do cold calling, or voice agents get outlawed altogether. It needs to be clear that the MSP is not taking the responsibility for how government reacts to the impact of AI.

Similarly, there should be an obligation on the customer’s part to be committed to ethical use of AI. Responsible AI is something that I put in as a mutual obligation to all parties to a contract that I write around AI. I think it’s foundational for humans to be committed to responsible AI.

So there’s things – just a few examples – but things that you wouldn’t see in an MSA. So ask yourself, why would you expect your pre-AI MSA to protect you in an AI world? The answer is MSPs increasingly are offering AI-related services under contracts that weren’t built for these services, and those that are, are putting themselves at significant risk. And it’s not necessary, because there is a ready-made solution for MSPs to protect themselves when engaged in selling Copilot, helping clients with AI projects, which we’re all going to be doing.

Let’s get it straight. This is not new. This is not a temporary blip. I think the only temporary part of it is this AI distinction. I don’t think there will be, in the long run, a distinction between AI tools and non-AI tools. All tools will be AI. So the way things are going, MSPs need to be prepared for that. All of what so many more MSPs are now in the territory where they would be protected by a specific service attachment that doesn’t exist in their contract stack today.

Robert Dutt: The other side of that equation of AI use in the MSP is that a lot of MSPs themselves are tempted to use some of the generic LLMs to draft or review their own contracts. Where do you see the line between that being helpful and that being dangerous?

Rob Scott: I don’t think MSPs should be forced to choose between using AI and using attorneys. I think that’s the state of the market today. They’re faced with these unsupervised LLMs that are risky, where there’s no accountability. They’re telling you, “Don’t use this for law,” and you’re using it for law. If you have a bad outcome, whose fault is it?

The New York State Senate has got a Senate bill, which I think will be the first of many, that would make it illegal for LLMs to give out legal advice, because it’s doing way more harm than good. I think the one thing to think about the perspective on this is lawyers are getting sanctioned and held in criminal contempt for using AI, and the AI is making mistakes. If it’s going undetected by the lawyers, why do you think you’re in a position to supervise the AI to protect your legal interests?

I mean, it gets it wrong so much. The accuracy of legal outputs from unsupervised LLMs is so low that it is like playing Russian roulette. So I don’t blame the MSP. I just think that the future is attorney-supervised AI, where the customer starts with a template that is lawyer grade. I think if you put Monjur Pilot up against these unsupervised LLMs and you draft an agreement starting with a Monjur template versus starting with nothing and an unsupervised LLM, your first pass is a totally different thing.

And then the second thing is lawyers need to be in the loop at the last mile. You should be able to press a button within your AI and say, “Submit for legal review,” and the lawyer should be able to just look at it in-app and finish what you built. So you start with a legal template that’s legal grade. You operate in a legal-grade AI environment that has the proper guardrails, and you make sure that attorneys supervise all of the work that the clients are doing, so that the MSP no longer has to choose between fast and inexpensive and slow and sometimes cost-prohibitive.

So we think that AI unlocks something pretty special for the Monjur subscriber, which is the benefit of having your lawyers at your fingertips 24/7 through a trained AI legal assistant. But that’s not a replacement for your lawyers. It just supplements your relationship with your lawyer. So in this way, we deliberately call them legal assistants because they play the same role as a legal assistant in a law firm. The legal assistants don’t practice law without the lawyer supervision. They help the clients get better service from the lawyers.

And that’s the role of AI in the Monjur vision, which is attorney-supervised LLMs that provide a safety layer on top of the LLM of your choosing. So our system is called “at any LLM,” but in each instance, we’ve implemented prevention of hallucination and preservation of context through RAG architecture that allows our legal assistants to give responses that the lawyers feel they can stand behind and nevertheless supervise.

Robert Dutt: Our audience is primarily Canadian MSPs and other types of IT solution providers. You serve over a thousand MSPs across North America, including Canada. What are the things that Canadian MSPs need to be thinking about in their contracts that their American friends don’t? I’m thinking PIPEDA, I’m thinking Quebec’s Law 25, the cross-border data question and data sovereignty, but I’m curious what you see as the biggest gaps from the Canadian side specifically.

Rob Scott: I think the ones that you mentioned are sort of at the surface, in the sense that those are concrete, objective things. Like, the data processing agreement for our US customers has different regulations in it than our Canadian customers, and the Canadian ones contain the laws that you mentioned.

The bigger issue that I see in Canada is a cultural issue. This idea that contracts are not important because we’re not in America where everybody sues at the drop of a hat. We don’t value legal protection in the same way that people might in the US, because the threat of litigation in their mind is lower than maybe the threat of litigation in the minds of the MSPs in America.

My response to that is I acknowledge the differences between the US and Canada as relates to litigation and dispute resolution, but I don’t think that that means that Canadian MSPs don’t benefit from having great contracts. It’s more of a question of what level of risk is being mitigated and the best way to mitigate it. I fear that too often in Canada, it’s not a question of does your DPA properly reflect Law 25 or PIPEDA. It’s a question of, are your agreements well thought out at all, because maybe you don’t think that it’s that important to have good agreements.

And it’s about 15 years culturally and mindset-wise behind the MSP market that I began working on. Where early on in America, there was a large sentiment that a handshake deal is good enough. I deal with my friends and I don’t perceive a high risk of litigation. And if someone wants to get out of my contract, they’re not happy with me, I let them go anyway. Why do I need all this paperwork?

And I think that’s a big thing that we have to work on for education with MSPs in Canada, which is you don’t have to be in a litigious market like America to benefit from good contracts.

Robert Dutt: Well, and here’s an interesting aspect to that cultural thing too. A lot of Canadian MSPs are serving clients on both sides of the border, or are using US-based vendor tools to deliver services to their Canadian customers. How should MSPs be thinking – even if they’re functional just in Canada in terms of customer base – how should they be thinking about cross-border exposure in their contracts?

Rob Scott: Well, look, I think that unless you know, for example, where every data subject resides in every system that you manage, you could be in Canada with customers with data subjects in their systems that you manage all over the US. And the laws run by where the data subject resides. So that’s one of the big challenges.

And then the other challenge is, don’t you want to put yourself in the position where you can say yes to as many deals and customers as possible? And don’t you want to make sure that you have compliant agreements that will allow you to operate in multiple markets?

And we have a lot of MSPs, I would say, that are on the Monjur platform that are enjoying dual libraries. So a set of agreements in English for the US, a set of agreements in Canada in English for English-speaking provinces, and then a set of agreements in Quebec, specifically for Quebecois law, presented in French. So we do offer some granularity in terms of localization in each market. And our strategy is we partner with local law firms in each jurisdiction to localize and maintain the updates of our agreements. And so we have a law firm that we work with in Quebec and several others in other provinces, including one in Toronto, where we partner with them to keep the agreements updated for those markets.

Robert Dutt: I think for a lot of MSPs, contracts are in the category of necessary evil, something they grudgingly do to avoid getting sued – or in some cases don’t do well enough to avoid getting sued. But I wonder if there is a case to be made for treating your contract stack as a competitive advantage, and if so, can you walk me through what that looks like in practice? How you can take a solid contracting situation and use it as a way to help your organization grow, and not just stay out of trouble when things go wrong.

Rob Scott: Yeah. So I think it’s an excellent question. I think the first part of it is something that now jives to me going to the dentist. Like, I know I have to go to the dentist. If I want to not have cavities, I have to go to the dentist. If I don’t want gum disease, I have to go to the dentist. I hate to go to the dentist. I’m so anxious when I get there, I tell them, please don’t take my blood pressure until we’re done, because it’ll just make it worse when you give me a really high blood pressure reading. I’m only going to be more anxious.

And I think with MSPs, that’s real too, as it relates to law. Many don’t feel comfortable with the subject matter. Many have had bad experiences. Many, like you say, would say it’s a necessary evil, but they try to avoid it as much as possible. Even if you caught them in a quiet moment of reflection to ask them if they really needed it, they would say yes, but they would go back to their office after that and lose track.

And this is why I think dynamic agreements that auto-update are so important for MSPs. I think legal needs to work in the background. And MSPs, I think, as a group, are carrying a very heavy cognitive load around contracting. A lot of the senior people that run MSPs are not contract people. It’s way out of their element. It doesn’t play to their strengths. It drains them of their energy. They’re constantly second-guessing whether they’re getting it right.

And what I think about competitive advantage, we talk in terms of the maturity model. Maturity level one: legal protection. You have the legal protection in place. Maturity level two: standardization and efficiency. Standardization and efficiency is like, how well have you collapsed your contracting processes into your sales process, so sales and contracting is one seamless step? So that’s kind of level two. Are all of your customers efficiently on the right paper? Can we update their terms without having to go get a signature?

This is how Monjur enables MSPs to grow revenue fast. We remove the friction from the sales process. We make deals go faster. We make it less likely that customers are going to want to comment or request changes to agreements. So that’s level two.

Level three is what we call contract intelligence. Using AI to optimize revenue opportunities. Making AI context-aware of your renewals, of your upgrades, of what people are paying, who is using a lot of resources but not paying for very much. These are the opportunities where contract intelligence drives better decision-making as well as automation to fuel efficiency to grow revenue faster.

So it really depends on where you are on this maturity level about how it helps you grow. Initially it may make it harder to grow while you’re getting the right legal protections in place. But ultimately you want something that can scale with your business, and that means dynamic versus static agreements.

Robert Dutt: My last question – I want to make this as concrete as possible. If you’re talking to a Canadian MSP owner, let’s say a 15-person shop doing managed services, building out security, starting to do AI in there too, they know their contracts are out of date or in bad shape but don’t really know where to start. What are the first two or three things that you’d tell them to do right now, right away, to get that ball rolling and to hopefully see the most improvement in the situation?

Rob Scott: Well, one of the things that I would say is benchmark what you’re currently using. Do an assessment of where you are. We have some tools online that can help you walk through an assessment of your current contracts, and we’ll also review them for you for free. If you have a contract, you’re an MSP in Canada and you want to understand what the gaps are relative to best practices, we’ll use our toolset to analyze your agreement, compare it to what we think are best practices in Canada, and do a report for you. We do that as part of our consultation process. There’s no fee for that. That’s a complimentary review. If you could get an experienced attorney to help you benchmark it, great.

The other thing to think about is updating your vendor list and asking yourself the question, “How am I protecting my MSP against acts or omissions of the vendors in my tech stack?” If you don’t have a good solution for that, then you need to be thinking about something like our schedule of third-party services, which allows you to list all your vendors and contains a waiver of the right for your clients to sue you. Now we’re covering a really big category of risk with that one attachment.

Then emerging services – advanced security and AI. You need specific agreements for these things. You can’t just continue to operate under the agreements that you were using pre-AI in the AI world. You can’t start offering compliance-related advisory services like GRC and other advanced security and compliance offerings without the appropriate contract. We call it the service attachment for managed compliance. Similarly with AI, we have a service attachment for managed AI.

You really need to be thinking about, do your agreements cover the services that you’re offering, delivered through the tech stack that you’re delivering it through, and in a way that’s compliant with the emerging framework of regulations that impact you and your customers? Given all of that – and we cover that with our data processing agreement – you can see why static agreements for MSPs can become very challenging very quickly.

If I was in the process of trying to figure out a way to manage risks for my MSP in Canada, I would be looking for a service that would give me dynamic updates that was specific to managed services, that was customizable for me and my customers. And think about this question: if my client were to sue me in court tomorrow, how confident am I that my current agreements would hold up in court? If the answer to that is, “I’m not so sure,” or “I’m not that confident,” or “I’m sure it would be a problem,” then getting a complimentary review of your current agreements and a game plan to move forward with broader protection is probably a good idea.

Robert Dutt: All right, I appreciate that. It’s a lot to think about, and it’s an area that I don’t think we focus on as much. We tend to get caught up in the tech stack and all that, so I appreciate your taking the time to share some wisdom on where things are at with contracts and where they’re going.

Rob Scott: Thank you. Thank you very much. I appreciate you having me.

Robert Dutt: There you have it. Rob Scott from Monjur. I’d like to thank Rob for his time. He brought a lot of depth to a topic that frankly doesn’t get a lot of attention in channel media.

A few things that are sticking with me from this conversation. First, the idea of the security recommendations clause – building language into your contract that says if you recommend a security measure and the client declines, anything that could have been prevented is on them. That’s the kind of provision that can save your business, and I’d wager a lot of MSPs listening don’t have it.

Second, his point about Canadian MSPs being about 15 years behind their American counterparts on contracting maturity – not because the laws are weaker, but because the culture around litigation is different up here. That’s a gap that works until it doesn’t.

And third, the question he posed that I think every MSP should sit with: why would you expect your pre-AI master service agreement to protect you in an AI world? If you’re selling Copilot bundles or managed AI services on a contract you wrote five years ago, you’ve got some homework to do.

If you’re enjoying the ChannelBuzz.ca podcast, we’d love it if you’d follow or subscribe. You can find us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, and most podcast directories. And if you have a minute to leave a rating or review, that goes a long way in helping other folks in the channel find the show.

Until next time, I’m Robert Dutt for ChannelBuzz.ca, and I’ll see you in the channel.

Robert Dutt: Hello and welcome to In The Channel from ChannelBuzz.ca, bringing news and information to the Canadian IT channel community for the last 16 years. I’m Robert Dutt, editor of ChannelBuzz.ca and your host for the show.

If you run an MSP, labor is your single biggest cost – roughly 75 cents of every dollar you bring in. So knowing what to pay, who to pay more, and where you might be over or under investing in your people isn’t just an HR exercise, it’s a profitability question.

Service Leadership, part of ConnectWise, has been benchmarking compensation across the IT solution provider space for years, and they’ve just released their 2026 annual report. What makes this year’s data especially interesting for our audience is that it includes dedicated Canadian data, and the Canadian picture looks quite different than the rest of the market.

My guest today is Peter Kujawa, Executive Vice President and General Manager of Service Leadership and IT Nation at ConnectWise. Peter is a former MSP operator himself, and he brings a practitioner’s eye to the data that I think you’ll find really useful. Let’s get right into it, my chat with Peter Kujawa.

Robert Dutt: Peter, thanks for joining us. Appreciate it.

Peter Kujawa: Yeah, happy to be here. Thanks for having me on.

Robert Dutt: I guess the name of the report kind of says what it does on the tin, but for listeners who aren’t familiar with the Service Leadership compensation report, can you kind of give us the 60-second version of what it is, how long it’s been running, and why you guys choose to run it?

Peter Kujawa: The compensation report has run – I think this is our seventh or eighth edition of it – but what’s significant is we’ve been running it as an annual report for the last four years. The reason that we’ve made it an annual report is because when we hadn’t run the report for seven years – Service Leadership last had run it in 2015 – in 2021, wage inflation was running so high and causing so many challenges for MSPs that we were getting a lot of questions about what I should be paying my people, what are increases looking like, I’m getting requests for 10, 12, 14% increases, is this in line with the market. And we didn’t have the data. And we’re data people – we like to be able to not talk in theoretical, but talk in data. And so we decided to dust off the older methodology and we ran the report in 2022. It was so successful that we decided to make it an annual report.

And so every year in October and November, we open up our portal and MSPs from all over the world enter their data into the system. Anybody who enters their data gets a free copy of the report. We publish it, and anybody else can still buy a copy of the report for $2,000 US. But the value of it’s incredible.

What we’re able to do with the report that nobody else can is, because we measure profitability of the industry worldwide, we’re able to correlate what companies – what MSPs – are paying their people, and profitability. So in other words, you’ll see in the report entire sections of analysis saying, what is it that the top quartile most profitable companies are doing differently in terms of paying their people than the bottom quartile? So that provides a lot of really useful guidance.

But really the meat of it is when you go into the actual tables. We have over 60 positions that we collect compensation data on from MSPs. And you can see, based on experience level, what MSPs are paying their people for these positions.

One of our objectives going in was to be able to provide a report that only shows data from the industry. All of our data is industry-specific data. And why that’s important is, while a hospital system or an enterprise company or others may have level one help desk positions, or they might have project engineers or other positions that sound like MSP positions, in reality, the jobs of those positions are different than they are at MSPs. It’s really hard when you go out and you do a market-based compensation study to really understand, as an MSP, what I should be paying my people versus what enterprise pays for similar positions. So our data is industry-specific. We collect it every year. It’s really recent. We carve it up by region and do different things to give value to MSPs all over the world.

Robert Dutt: You’ve said in the past that we’re in the golden age of running an MSP. The compensation data from this year’s report – does it back that up? Does it complicate things? Basically, what’s the headline here in terms of the compensation trend?

Peter Kujawa: I would say both. And so first of all, yes, I said that – including last week at London from the main stage keynote. The last six years have been the best profitability years ever for the industry. Best in class has done better than ever. Bottom quartile has lost less money than ever. Still in many cases losing money, but that’s a different discussion.

However, MSPs’ largest source of cost is what they pay their people. Delivering services is, by definition, a services-based business. So if I’m delivering managed services, I’m spending about 25% of my cost of goods on my tools. The other 75% or so is on my people. And MSP employees have historically had wage increases at about twice the rate of CPI.

So the challenge for MSPs has been, I’m having to pay my people these increases, I’m seeing my cost of labor going up at twice the rate of inflation, I can only increase my customer’s cost by a certain degree. I probably can’t increase them year over year for too many years in a row at twice the rate of inflation. So I need to figure out how to be more efficient in my business.

The good news for MSPs is that crazy wage inflation we saw back in ’21 and ’22 has mitigated in three of the four geos. The only exception is Europe. So it’s gotten better, but wage inflation is still a huge issue for MSPs.

Since 2013, we measure the relationship between service revenue and the cost of your service team and wages. It’s one of our most important KPIs at Service Leadership. And we haven’t seen any improvement in that since 2013, despite the tools getting better, despite pricing increasing. MSPs have been stuck because wage inflation has been so hot.

And so yes, the last six years have been the best time ever for MSPs. But MSPs have to fix this issue with labor costs. And so that’s what’s so exciting about AI and automation, the things that we’re doing at ConnectWise with zofiQ and our platform. These are things that give MSPs the opportunity to finally get ahead and really take a bite out of this labor cost issue.

Robert Dutt: Let’s talk about Canada specifically. Your data shows that Canadian solution providers are planning the lowest pay increases of any region. I think it was only 7% of employees are getting raises north of 6%, 42% getting 3% or less. What’s behind that?

Peter Kujawa: Well, I think there’s a bunch of things that are going on right now. Number one is, depending on the region, there’s some economic softness. And when there’s softness in the economy in general, that comes into the labor pool. So if other companies are not adding staff at the same rate, it takes some of the pressure off of MSPs in that area. So there’s definitely some of that going on.

I think also just the overall tech economy, especially in North America – we’ve seen a lot of announcements about significant cuts from some of the larger tech companies. And that has a way of bleeding down into the MSP space. We saw the opposite in 2020 and ’21 and ’22, and that was all these companies are hiring and they’re adding remote labor all over. And all of a sudden, local MSPs are having to compete with some of the biggest tech companies in the world for their local talent because of remote work.

Well, many of those – A, many of those companies have been cutting a lot of jobs and it’s been very publicized over the past year. B, remote work has changed as well. We have analysis in there showing that most companies in the MSP space have returned to the office. And that’s definitely something that I think you’ve seen in big tech as well. So those two things have taken some of the pressure off and improved those really high-level increases. And I think that’s what we’ve seen in three of our four markets.

Robert Dutt: In terms of the Canadian numbers, I’m curious if you see them making – is it a company choice? Is it discipline, or is it a sign that Canadian MSPs are under more financial pressure than their peers in other markets?

Peter Kujawa: I’d have to run and take a look at the data on the profitability of the Canadian market compared to some of the other markets right now. I’m not aware of any of that being an issue right now, but I could certainly take a look at that, Robert, and get back to you. I think it’s more a case of the North America trends on labor. It’s probably indicative of a general softness in the Canadian economy and just some concerns that companies have. When companies are concerned about what’s going on today in the macro economy in their region, they pull back on hiring. Well, when they pull back on hiring, that creates less opportunities for the employees of the MSP to jump ship and go somewhere else and get a big bump.

Second of all, I think MSPs are known as great training grounds for tech employees, and the tech employees know this. Recruiters know this. MSPs are really fertile recruiting ground. Well, it’s a lot more tempting to take that offer when it looks like the economy is red hot and everybody’s growing. When it looks like, you know, things are pretty good for me at the MSP – I like what I do, and yes, I could go to this other company, but we’re seeing all these cuts at all these other companies, and my MSP is doing fine and growing and has been good to me – maybe I’m happy with a normal increase and maybe that huge increase I was looking at getting is not as tempting and I’m maybe not going to leverage it. So I think all these things tie together when you’re looking at what goes on in wage inflation in our industry.

Robert Dutt: So from the other point of view, it kind of cuts the chances of it becoming a retention issue. As you say, there’s those kinds of loyalty factors built in. One of the more counterintuitive findings is that best-in-class MSPs – the top quarter in profitability – gave roughly three times fewer large pay increases than bottom quartile firms. What are they doing differently?

Peter Kujawa: Yeah, it’s an interesting question. There’s a few factors that tie in. There’s some other linkage to what the best in class is doing differently, but I think specifically in terms of increases, there’s a couple things that play out.

Number one is the best in class have built a business that is much easier to recruit somebody into and get that person to be productive faster. And what I mean by that is best-in-class companies are servicing a more narrow target customer profile. They are much more likely to have their customer base on a singular tech stack. So they’re not servicing multiple vendors per each thing that they offer.

So let’s say, for example, firewall support – just a basic example. A best-in-class company is much more likely to have unified on a single vendor and have 100% of their managed service clients on that vendor’s products. As a result, it’s a lot easier for a new tech coming in to understand their offerings, to become productive faster. So they hire more level one techs and they’re able to recruit those techs and get them up and running easier.

That gives them an advantage when there’s techs that are thinking of leaving and they need to match a higher increase in order to keep that tech. If you know that we’re going to lose a certain number of techs a year and we’re going to need to replace a certain number of techs a year and it’s fine, we’ll deal with it, we have the engine that’s capable of sustaining and bringing them in – well, then I’m more likely, when a tech comes in on a Friday and says, “Hey, I’ve got this offer. I like it here, but it’s a 20% increase or 15% increase. If you match it, I’ll stay” – well, if I’m a bottom quartile shop and I have all this additional complexity in my organization, it’s harder for me to get somebody up and running. I’m probably more likely to match that or come close to it if they stay. If I’m a best-in-class shop, I’m much more likely to say, “Hey, you’ve been great here. Glad we hired you two years ago or whenever. Keep in touch. And if you know anybody who’d be a good fit, send them our way.”

So that’s one factor.

Number two is, when you work at a bottom quartile MSP, it’s not a lot of fun. Process is not as good. As I said, you don’t have as much of a unified tech stack and target customer profile. As a result, the quality of your service delivery tends to suffer. You’re probably getting yelled at more often by your customers. It’s just, in general, not as enjoyable of a place to be.

Best-in-class shops grow the fastest. When you’re working at a best-in-class MSP that’s growing at twice the rate of a bottom quartile MSP, that means there’s going to be more opportunity for you from a career perspective. Life is a lot more fun when you’re at a faster growing, more profitable firm. So those companies are able to be more discerning on the increases that they give.

I think the other factor at play is the best-in-class MSPs tend to be much better at using data to make decisions. And that’s not just for what they pay their people – they use data and really understand what’s going on in their business, in their industry. They’re less likely to just throw around increases for the sake of increases, and they run their businesses in a tighter way. So I think there’s several things that tie into that.

Robert Dutt: It sounds like the takeaway, the lesson, is not so much “pay less” as it is structure the organization more intentionally, more thoughtfully, and you’re able to – for all these reasons that you outline – keep people or better react when folks do want to move away for a much higher paycheck.

Peter Kujawa: Yeah. Run your business at a higher operational maturity level, and you will get all sorts of other benefits from it, including this.

One of the other slides that is in there that’s tied into what you just said is, we looked at on average, by category of employee, what is the best in class, median, and bottom quartile pay in each category. And one of the questions I get a lot from the report is, on average, the best in class pays their managed services team $10,000 a year less than the bottom quartile. It’s about $75,000 for bottom quartile, about $65,000 for best in class.

So the question is, well, if I go work at a best-in-class MSP, am I being underpaid? Do I have to take a pay cut to go work at a best-in-class MSP, or are they just not fair with what they pay their people? The answer is, that’s not the way to look at that data. The best in class is able to pay less on average because, if you look at a managed service team, you have level one techs, level two techs, level threes. You also have service managers, you have vCIOs, project managers or project coordinators. So you have all these people that constitute the team, but the majority of the positions are your techs – level one, two, and three techs.

Our data says that the best in class have a much higher percentage of level one techs. The bottom quartile have a much higher percentage of level two and three techs. So if I have two MSPs side by side, and they both have 10 techs in their tech team, but one of them has two level ones and the other eight are a mix of level twos and threes – well, those level twos and threes cost a lot more. So if I have another MSP that has 10 techs but six of them are level one techs and four of them are level two and three, those level one techs cost a lot less. If I add all those up and I divide by the number of employees I have, my average cost per tech is much lower if I have more level one techs than if I have more level two and three techs.

So you can go to work at a best-in-class MSP and do well. In fact, they pay more incentive pay as a percentage on average. So if you’re really a rock star and you go in and do a great job at the business, you should actually be able to make as much or more money.

Robert Dutt: You talked before about the 14% or so of gross margin benchmark for marketing spend. Are there similar concrete benchmarks in this report that an MSP owner could take back to their business this week and immediately act on in terms of improving profitability or improving the business?

Peter Kujawa: Yes. There’s a number of them. I would say it would depend on the size or maturity of the MSP what they would act on or take back. But if nothing else, the first thing I would suggest is go into the actual data tables and see how your people compare and understand if – first of all, no MSP leader or owner ever hears from their people, “You know, I think we’re kind of overpaid. Why don’t we – we would like to see our pay reduced to the market,” right? There’s a constant pressure to do two things when you’re running an MSP. Number one is to pay more. Number two is to add more bodies.

So I would go back first and foremost, look at the tables and say, here’s what I have for people, here’s their experience level, here’s where they’re at. How am I comparing to what I’m seeing in the market? That would be number one.

Number two is I would, regardless of the size of the MSP, look at my incentive pay for both managers and staff positions. I would take a look at what percentage of total annual earnings are tied to incentive. The best in class on average ties about three times as much to incentive pay as the bottom quartile, for both staff and for managers.

Well, how do they do that? There’s some best practices to incentive compensation. What you don’t want to do is go out tomorrow and just cut a percentage of pay out of your people’s base and shift it to incentive and say, “Hey, great news guys. Effective today, I just cut your pay by 10%, but now you get an incentive and you can actually earn a little bit more.” That will not go well.

So there’s best practices for how to implement this. Start with your managers. Build the incentive, make sure you’ve got it right, you’re measuring it right. Then roll it out to your staff positions. What you’re incenting is really important. You want to make sure you’re tying it to the greatest degree of what they have control over. And you’re not just tying everything to the profitability of the business or sales growth. There are other things that people tend to have more influence over. So really understand incentive pay and how to leverage that as well.

Depending on the size your MSP is, there’s also some really interesting information in there about some of the staffing composition. For example, we know that – you cited the 14% of gross margin should be invested in sales and marketing. That’s true. About 4% or so of that tends to go to marketing. About 10% of that tends to go to sales. But what’s interesting is, when we looked at staffing FTEs by role, the best in class are actually adding more lead gen people in marketing and the bottom quartile are adding more salespeople. So they’re both trying to grow their business. They’re both focused on new logo acquisition. But the best in class has learned that salespeople are expensive. They’re hard to find great ones. It takes a while to get them productive. When I have a good one, I’m much better off to invest some additional money in my marketing engine and use that marketing engine to drive more leads back to my salespeople and make sure that my salespeople are really doing what they’re best at all day. The bottom quartile tends to just add more sales bodies and hope that they can be more productive.

So there are some differences in the report that get into some of those best practices. It’s part of the reason the ConnectWise partner program was designed the way that it was – to really help with lead gen and to help MSPs tackle some of those challenges. Because it’s really frustrating when you add salespeople and you’re spending a lot of money and you’re not seeing new sales come in. You want to make sure that they’re really productive.

Robert Dutt: This year you’re tracking digital workers for the first time – AI agents, automation bots. How widespread is adoption right now amongst the firms in your data set? Are we talking about 5% experimenting, or is this something that’s pretty material in the results?

Peter Kujawa: At this point, the data told us about what we expected, which is we’re really early on. Our goal this year was to collect a baseline number. And what we saw was that most MSPs as of last year did not yet have full-time digital workers, but where we did see them was in level one and level two tech roles, which – that’s where we’re seeing it in the industry in general. So that makes perfect sense to us. What we think we’ll see is, over the next couple of years, those numbers are going to start to ramp up pretty significantly.

Robert Dutt: When you look at firms that are deploying digital workers and you look at their compensation data side by side, are they paying fewer people more, or are they just running leaner?

Peter Kujawa: I think at this point, because of how early on they are, they’re just getting up and going. But where we’re starting to see the gains is you’re starting to see a little bit of a shift in the staffing model mix. Back to that firm that has 10 employees in their help desk – let’s say they’re best in class and they have six of those are level ones, three of them are level twos and they have one level three. What we’re starting to see is, as the report says, there’s about 23% or so turnover in your level ones. So as they are losing some of their level one techs, they’re not backfilling some of those positions at all or as quickly.

As they’re building these efficiency gains into their help desk and starting to see some automation gains, we are starting to see some impact in profitability and in that staffing model. Again, we’re really in the early, early stages of this. We think it’ll start showing up significantly in the Service Leadership data by later this year, because our profitability data is always a quarter behind by definition. But anecdotally, some of the MSPs that we talk to are starting to see those gains, and they are starting to see that manifest with their level one staffing particularly.

Robert Dutt: It’s going to be an interesting space to watch and see what that looks like as that trend line develops. If you’re a Canadian MSP owner, particularly a smaller MSP, and you could look at only two or three data points from this report to kind of pressure test your own comp strategy, what would you be looking at first?

Peter Kujawa: I would look first at the data tables of the average by experience per position. So I would first start with all my most common positions. For most MSPs, those are going to be level one and maybe level two techs. And I’m going to look at by experience, what am I paying each of my people? So I’m going to use that. And then I’m going to go into my other positions through my organization. I’m going to use that to really pressure test – am I paying correctly?

Number two is I would go in and look at my incentive pay. Do I have something tied to performance for every one of my people? If I do, am I doing this the right way? Have I set up the plans in a way that’s going to lead to better results for the business and for the employee when the employee does great? I mean, that’s one of the measures of an optimal incentive plan – when the employee overperforms and gets paid on an overperformance, everybody’s happy. If the employee is happy but the owner of the business is unhappy because the employee hit their overperformance, well, that’s bad. I’ve got a problem with my incentive.

So I’m going to look at how I structured the incentive for everybody. Those would be number one and number two.

Number three, I’m going to start looking at, depending on the size of MSP I am, what should my model be evolving into? I’m going to use this as part of my budgeting. So depending on the fiscal year timing, you might be early-stage fiscal year, you might be late-stage if you do a mid-year fiscal year. Regardless, I’m going to start looking at this data and start modeling it out to see how does this fit into my budget for next year. What should I be starting to plan on for changes I’m going to want to make in my compensation structure? Because you really want to get ahead of those and make sure that they fit into the overall business goals of what you’re trying to do.

Robert Dutt: You mentioned near the top of the interview that wage inflation peaked in 2022. It’s been easing since. Is that a reason for MSPs to breathe easier, or is it masking something that they should be watching?

Peter Kujawa: Yeah, it’s the opposite. In 2022, wage inflation was running upwards of 10% or more. We were seeing these crazy increases out in the market as a norm. But on the flip side, we were also seeing managed service organic revenue growth running at its peak – about 25%. And the reason it was so hot was a mix of a few things, but a significant contributing factor was price increases on managed service offerings. MSPs got much better at that time at understanding, I have a gun to my head from all this wage inflation – I better start doing some uncomfortable things with increasing pricing for my customer base. And they did. And we saw that in the data, which got the MSPs through it. They were able to maintain profitability, et cetera. So that was the good news.

The bad news is that you can’t increase prices at that level indefinitely. And so yes, wage inflation is better, but again, we’re back to more of a normal increased cadence on pricing. And yet MSP wage inflation, even though it’s much, much better than 2022, still runs about twice the rate of CPI.

MSPs cannot take their eye off the ball with this. It’s really important as we go forward that MSPs be focused on where can I drive efficiency gains in my business. Where do I have waste today? Forget AI and automation for a second. Are there employees that I’ve been carrying that are not producing, but I like them, and so I keep them around? I just haven’t been disciplined at making some tough decisions. If that’s the case, make those tough decisions first.

Second is, every MSP out there needs to be focused on automation and AI. It’s not for luxury reasons. It’s for survival reasons. The industry is changing rapidly. Every MSP needs to be focused on how can I get more efficient with my cost of labor and how can I make sure that as I’m growing my business, I’m not growing my labor cost at an equivalent rate to the growth of my business.

These things will ensure that not only will the MSP survive, but they should be able to improve their profitability. If they’re bottom quartile, get up to median. If they’re median, get up to best in class. And really be well positioned for the evolution of the industry over the next few years.

So yes, it’s good news that wage inflation has improved. But it hasn’t taken the pressure off at all for MSPs to focus in on AI and automation.

Robert Dutt: And my last question – what’s one thing that surprises you in this year’s data that you didn’t expect to find there?

Peter Kujawa: That’s a great question, because nothing surprises me at this point ever looking at the data year in and year out. I think I continue to be really surprised by the bottom quartile and the median. We’ve been talking for years about incentive pay and tying your employees to performance. And yet we’re not seeing the needle move significantly in the bottom quartile and the median in that regard.

I would have expected by now, with how many years we’ve been talking about this and publishing this data, that we would have seen some more significant improvements in tying employees’ pay to performance. But we’re not really seeing that significantly change.

So again, if I’m a smaller, midsize MSP, or even a larger MSP, I’m going to use the report as an opportunity to go in and look at what we’re doing in that regard and make sure that we’re doing what we can to tie employee performance to their pay.

Robert Dutt: It makes a lot of sense. I think that disconnect is a big neon sign pointing towards an opportunity to optimize. Peter, I appreciate your taking the time and walking us through so much of this data. There’s some real value in there for the MSP community.

Peter Kujawa: Well, thanks for having me, Robert. Enjoyed the interview.

Robert Dutt: There you have it – Peter Kujawa from ConnectWise and Service Leadership. I’d like to thank Peter for his time. He brought a lot of substance to this one. And thank you for listening.

A few things I’m taking away from the conversation. First, that Canadian stat. We’ve got the lowest planned pay increases of any region in the report. Peter’s read on that is that it’s less about financial pressure and more about a macro environment that’s eased the competitive pressure on talent. Whether that’s a strategic advantage or a risk you’re not seeing yet is worth thinking about.

Second, and this might be the most actionable piece – the best-in-class firms aren’t just paying less. They’re paying differently. More incentive-based comp, smarter staffing mix, investing in lead gen over sales headcount. That’s a playbook, not just a data point.

And third, if you’re not using incentive pay yet, you’re in the majority, but that’s not necessarily where you want to be.

We’ll have a link to the report in the show notes. If you’re enjoying the ChannelBuzz.ca podcast, do me a favor and follow or subscribe wherever you’re listening. We’re on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, and most of the major directories. And if you’ve got a minute to leave a rating or a review, that goes a long way to helping other folks in the channel find the show.

Until next time, I’m Robert Dutt for ChannelBuzz.ca, and I’ll see you in the channel.

Welcome to In Case You Missed It from ChannelBuzz.ca. I’m Robert Dutt, editor of ChannelBuzz.ca. Today is Monday, March 23rd, 2026. Let’s get your week started right.

This week’s In Case You Missed It is brought to you by ESET Canada. ESET’s Women in Cybersecurity Scholarship is now open for 2026, with three $5,000 awards available to women pursuing careers in cybersecurity. Applications close April 8th. Learn more and apply at eset.com/ca. ESET – protecting progress.

The biggest Canadian tech infrastructure story in a while landed last week, and it didn’t come from Toronto or Montreal or Vancouver. Bell Canada announced a partnership with SaskTel and SaskPower to build a 300-megawatt AI data center outside Regina, Saskatchewan. The facility is projected to generate up to $12 billion in economic value for the province, and it’s being positioned as Canada’s largest purpose-built data center.

The anchor tenants tell you where this is headed: Cerebras Systems and CoreWeave, two of the biggest names in AI compute infrastructure, are signed on. This isn’t a general-purpose facility — it’s built for the kind of GPU-dense, power-hungry workloads that AI training and inference demand.

For the Canadian channel, there are a few things to watch. Local IT providers in Saskatchewan and Western Canada could see downstream opportunities in connectivity, edge infrastructure, and professional services around AI deployments. The data sovereignty angle is real — keeping AI compute on Canadian soil is increasingly a selling point with public sector and regulated-industry customers. And the scale of this investment signals that Canada is becoming a serious destination for AI infrastructure, not just a market that consumes AI services built somewhere else.

If you’re quoting hardware right now, you need to see WBM Technologies’ March procurement update. It’s the most useful thing a Canadian partner has published this month, and the message is blunt: They’re telling customers to buy the RAM and storage you need to support your systems for the lifetime of that system.

Every single vendor category WBM tracks is now listed as constrained. HPE has seen a 24 to 30 percent list price increase in March alone, with quote validity down to just 14 days. Fortinet is implementing monthly 10 percent price increases. Dell expects further adjustments on March 30th. And HP is coming with another minimum 10 percent increase on April 1st.

WBM is linking to Nature magazine, which is calling this “RAMmageddon.” If you’ve been following our coverage of the component shortage over the past few weeks, this is the same story, but it’s accelerating. We’ll have a link to the full WBM update in the show notes. It’s worth bookmarking.

Two weeks ago on this podcast, we talked about Ingram Micro’s AgenTeq platform and the push to bring agentic AI into the distribution workflow. Now AWS is doing something similar inside Partner Central.

At its Global Partner Summit, AWS announced AI-powered sales agents built on Amazon Bedrock AgentCore. Partners can upload meeting notes and have opportunity records auto-updated. The agent flags whether a deal qualifies for AWS funding programs like MAP and can generate draft funding requests pre-filled with deal details. AWS says partners using its solution matching engine are seeing 15 percent higher win rates and 44 percent faster close times.

The pattern is becoming clear: vendors are using AI to fix the messy middle of partner selling — the admin, the quoting, the funding applications, the administrivia. Worth watching how quickly this becomes table stakes.

And finally, Exabeam launched a new commercial framework for MSSPs last week, offering two licensing models: a single pooled multi-tenant option and a federated subscription model. The idea is to give managed security service providers more flexibility in how they package and price Exabeam’s SIEM and analytics platform for their customers. For partners building or scaling MSSP practices, it’s worth a look. We’ll have a link in the show notes.

Those are some of the things we were paying attention to last week. 

Big week ahead on In The Channel. 

Peter Kujawa from ConnectWise’s Service Leadership practice on why Canadian MSPs are planning the lowest pay increases of any region — and why that might not be a bad thing. 

Rob Scott from Monjur on why most MSP contracts wouldn’t survive a courtroom. 

Cisco Canada on the perfect storm driving a multi-year infrastructure refresh. 

And our very first Life After the Channel episode, with Martin McNicoll, who went from NetSuite President’s Club to making grain-to-bottle whisky in the Eastern Townships. 

For ChannelBuzz.ca, I’m Robert Dutt. Have a great week, and I’ll see you in the channel.

Hello and welcome to In the Channel from ChannelBuzz.ca, bringing news and information to the Canadian IT channel for the last 16 years. I’m Robert Dutt, editor of ChannelBuzz.ca, and as always your host for the show.

Before we get started, a quick note on today’s episode.

This one’s a little different from what I usually do here. There’s no interview, no guest — just me, thinking out loud about something I’ve been circling for a long time.

It’s less about breaking news, and more about sense-making.

And it starts with a thought I’ve had more times than I can count…

I could have been writing that distribution was about to be disintermediated since the late 1990s. And if I’m honest, sometimes I probably should have — because every few years, there’s a new reason why this time feels different.

E-commerce.

The cloud.

Marketplaces.

Vendors going straight to partners.

Vendors going straight to customers.

Pick your era — the argument has always been there.

And yet, here we are.

Distribution didn’t disappear. It didn’t even really shrink in relevance. What it did instead was something quieter, and maybe more interesting: it evolved — repeatedly.

So today I want to talk through why I never quite bought into the “this finally kills distribution” argument… even though, on the surface, it often sounded very convincing.

If you’ve been around the channel long enough, you’ve heard this cycle before.

A new model emerges that looks cleaner, faster, more efficient. Someone points out that vendors don’t need intermediaries anymore. Someone else argues that software margins can’t support the old model. And suddenly, distribution is framed as legacy — or worse, inertia.

What makes these arguments compelling is that they’re not wrong in isolation.

Yes, vendors can sell direct. Yes, marketplaces remove friction. Yes, partners want fewer hops between themselves and the vendor.

But what these predictions often miss is that they’re describing a transaction, not an ecosystem.

And distribution has never really been about a single transaction.

So what actually happened?

Distribution didn’t disappear — but it also didn’t stay the same.

Over the last twenty-plus years, there’s been real churn. Companies have come and gone. The market consolidated dramatically. What many once grumbled was an over-distributed landscape gradually became something closer to right-sized.

That’s important, because survival here didn’t mean freezing the model in time. It meant pruning, merging, specializing — and in some cases, starting over entirely.

Broadline distributors gave way to value-added distributors. Value-added distributors made room for cloud-centric distributors.

And you can trace this through specific inflection points. The largest merger in distribution history created the world’s biggest technology distributor — not as a retreat, but as consolidation at scale. Cloud-native distributors that barely existed fifteen years ago have grown into billion-dollar businesses by building entirely new models around subscription commerce and lifecycle management. And just in recent weeks, we’ve seen a major vendor shift more of its partner management to a distributor — not less.

These aren’t the moves of a model in decline. They’re the moves of a model still being invested in.

Through every major shift that was supposed to bury distribution, what actually emerged was a new version of it.

The form changed. The function endured.

And that function — at its core — has always been scale.

Scale of logistics.

Scale of credit.

Scale of enablement.

Scale of relationships.

That last one is easy to underestimate. Over the last couple of decades, many distributors moved well beyond transactional relationships and invested in building partner communities — creating spaces for peer learning, business planning, and strategic engagement that had nothing to do with moving product. That shift quietly changed where distribution sits in the ecosystem.

Even in a cloud world, someone still has to aggregate demand, mitigate complexity, and make it economically viable for thousands of partners to transact with hundreds of vendors — without every interaction becoming bespoke.

That problem never went away.

And for those of us in Canada, these dynamics are amplified. In a market this size, spread across this much geography, with a relatively small and diverse partner base, the aggregation function of distribution isn’t optional — it’s essential. Canadian-dollar credit facilities, in-country logistics, bilingual support, compliance with Canadian regulatory requirements — these aren’t things a vendor portal south of the border can easily replicate. Distribution in Canada has always had to earn its place a little more visibly, and arguably, that’s made it more resilient.

Years ago, I heard many solution providers describe distribution as a “necessary evil.”

Not evil in the moral sense — just unavoidable. Sometimes frustrating. Sometimes slow. Sometimes misaligned with how partners wanted to operate.

I hear that sentiment less today.

That’s not to say distribution is perfect now. It isn’t. And it’s not to say frustrations are gone. They aren’t.

But I think the shift itself is telling.

When parts of the model stopped working, they didn’t get defended forever. They got replaced. When value became unclear, it had to be re-articulated — or the model lost relevance.

That evolution didn’t eliminate criticism, but it did change the tone of it. And tone is often a lagging indicator of whether an industry is adapting in the right direction.

Here’s the thing about disintermediation narratives: they tend to assume that if you remove one layer, everything becomes simpler.

In practice, complexity doesn’t vanish — it just moves. It expresses itself differently.

Vendors still don’t want to manage thousands of small relationships directly. Partners still don’t want to onboard dozens of vendors one by one, each with unique billing, support, and enablement models. And customers still expect solutions to work together, reliably, at scale.

Distribution absorbs a lot of that complexity — quietly — and that’s why it often looks invisible right up until the moment you try to remove it.

And what’s striking is that distribution’s next chapter may be its most ambitious yet.

The major cloud marketplaces — the very platforms that were once framed as distribution’s replacement — are becoming a space where distributors are actively carving out a role. Not competing with marketplaces, but integrating with them — helping partners navigate multi-cloud procurement, manage billing complexity across platforms, and make sense of an increasingly fragmented buying landscape.

Industry research suggests the channel will handle the majority of enterprise marketplace transactions within the next few years. That’s not despite distribution — it’s increasingly through it.

At the same time, distribution is stepping into AI enablement — not just listing AI-powered products in a catalogue, but helping partners evaluate what to trust, how to deploy responsibly, and how to build services practices around fast-moving technology. That’s a governance and advisory function. It’s a long way from moving boxes.

None of that was in the job description twenty years ago. But it’s a natural extension of what distribution has always done: absorb complexity so the rest of the ecosystem doesn’t have to.

Some distributors disappeared. Others merged. New ones emerged with radically different focuses. That’s not failure — that’s evolution doing its job.

The broader lesson here isn’t really about distribution at all.

It’s about ecosystems.

Industries that survive disruption aren’t the ones that never change. They’re the ones willing to let old versions of themselves die so that new ones can emerge.

Distribution didn’t survive by insisting it was always right. It survived by changing often enough — and decisively enough — that its role stayed relevant even as individual players did not.

That’s a much harder path than simply defending the status quo. And it’s one that doesn’t always look graceful from the outside.

So yes — I could have been writing that distribution was about to be disintermediated since the late ’90s.

And every few years, the argument probably sounded stronger than the last.

But the reason I didn’t is simple: the prediction never accounted for how adaptable the model actually was — or for the fact that the underlying problems distribution solves never really went away.

If anything, they just changed shape.

And as long as that’s true, the obituary for distribution is probably still a long way from being written.

At least, that’s how I see it.

But this is a space built on the experience of those who live with distribution day in and day out, not theory — and I’m very aware that my view is only one angle on a long and complicated story.

If you’re an MSP, a VAR, a vendor, a distributor, or someone who’s lived through a few of these industry transitions yourself, I’d genuinely love to hear how you see it.

What am I missing? What has distribution gotten right — or wrong — in your world, to allow it to survive?

You can leave a comment, drop me an email, or find me on LinkedIn. I read it all, and it shapes where this conversation goes next.

That’s it for me today. For ChannelBuzz.ca, I’m Robert Dutt, and I’ll see you in the channel.

Robert Dutt: Hello and welcome to the ChannelBuzz.ca podcast, bringing news and information to the Canadian IT channel for the last 16 years. I’m Robert Dutt, editor of ChannelBuzz.ca and still your host for the show. Today we’re talking about a problem a lot of MSPs and channel partners are starting to feel, even if they don’t always have a name for it yet, and that’s visibility. As AI workloads, hybrid architectures and distributed endpoints become the norm, network traffic is changing faster than the tools that many partners rely on to understand what’s actually happening inside their customers’ environments. My guest today is Jeff Collins, CEO of WanAware. Jeff spends a lot of time with service providers and enterprise teams dealing with this shift, where accountability for performance, security and uptime is increasing, even as environments become harder to see and harder to diagnose when something goes wrong. WanAware operates in the network and infrastructure visibility space, but this conversation isn’t about the tools, the dashboards. It’s about how blind spots form in modern networks, why they’re easy to miss until there’s an outage, a security issue, or an SLA failure, and what partners need to understand as AI-driven infrastructure quietly reshapes traffic patterns and dependencies. In this discussion, we’re going to explore where traditional monitoring starts to fall apart, how partners can rethink what good visibility really means today, and why the ability to see what’s happening across distributed environments is quickly becoming both a risk issue and a business opportunity for MSPs. If you’re responsible for customer outcomes, but you don’t always feel confident you can see everything that matters, this conversation is for you.

[MUSIC]

Robert Dutt: Jeff, thanks for taking the time. I appreciate it.

Jeff Collins: Thanks, Rob. Thanks for having me on.

Robert Dutt: You’ve been advising partners, MSPs, VARs, these types of folks through a lot of change over time. Why does this moment with the rise of AI workloads and the continuing trend of hybrid networks feel like a real inflection point rather than sort of just the next evolution of the way things look?

Jeff Collins: I think one of the biggest reasons why is because it’s so transformational to what MSPs and resellers and VARs and distributors have dealt with for, let’s say, the last 25 years. If we think about the last major inflection point that they dealt with was really kind of the realm of the hypervisor, this ecosystem where no longer did we have to have a server running an operating system, and that created kind of the whole ecosystem we deal with today. It created cloud, it created containers, all those things were built off this concept of a hypervisor. That was really the last major transformational thing that has happened. Now we fast forward to today and we’ve got this era of AI. We’ve got this era where we’re now taking agentic approaches, generative approaches, to things that our customers deal with every day. When I talk about our customers, those are the customers of the MSP, those are the customers of the reseller, the distributor. Not only are they dealing with that, they’re dealing with this massive evolution in the customer base, but they’re also having to do that same evolution in their own environments. If you’re an MSP and you’re focused on infrastructure, or you’re an MSP and you look more like an MSSP where you’re focused on security, now you’re starting to have to deal with, “Okay, I’ve got these tools, I’ve got these people, I’ve got these agents, I’ve got all these entities inside of my business that are doing something for my customer.” But now I have to think about how am I going to do that faster? How am I going to do that better? How am I going to do that more effectively? Because our customers are getting much more advanced. That’s really one of the biggest things that I see that we’re seeing a lot of, that “Where do I start?” from the channel partner community. When we think about the channel, we know all this stuff is going on, but it seems like such a Herculean lift that I think sometimes it’s hard to know where we make that first step.

Robert Dutt: That makes sense. A lot of this, a lot of AI especially, and to a degree sort of the hybridization of the network, that complexity has come on without kind of a formal network redesign. Like you mentioned the transition to hypervisors and that necessitated rethinking how things were done because it was a physical change. Whereas a lot of, especially with AI, it’s kind of being bolted in, added on as you go. Why does that make the environment today harder to understand than maybe it was for past transitions when you’re sitting there watching it as an MSP or other partner?

Jeff Collins: Well, I think one of the biggest reasons why this era is so much more difficult than the last transition is because we’re not bound by the four walls of our proverbial house. If we think about when we dealt with the last transition, every customer, their physical server sat inside of something they control. So we’ll refer to it as their house because that’s the easiest kind of comparison we can do. In today’s world, there’s certainly a lot that exists in our customers’ houses and in the houses that the MSP or the reseller or the channel partner or whomever it is are engaged in. But so much of that’s going outside of those walls. And when we think about AI, AI is certainly outside of those walls. I mean, we might be dealing with Anthropic, we might be dealing with ChatGPT or Gemini or the thousand other agentic or generative approaches that are out there. Those are all over the place. And now we’re asking these entities to take oftentimes a process-driven approach that they’ve had for 20, 25 years. And how do you change that process-driven approach when you don’t really know where those workloads, where those assets, where that data is going to reside either today or tomorrow, or even if that data that we’re looking at is even going to exist tomorrow. That’s this whole realm. I mean, we’ve been talking about ephemeral workloads for, you know, let’s call it 14 years, 15 years since really the rise of AWS. But now we’re starting to deal with these ephemeral workloads, not just in the realm of infrastructure, but also in data, in generative concepts, in agents. You know, historically, we had Bob Smith, who might have worked in the NOC. Well, tomorrow, Bob Smith is an agent. What does that look like? It’s AI. What did Bob Smith do yesterday? Did Bob Smith, the new agentic version of Bob Smith, did that person do the right thing, the wrong thing, the incorrect thing? How do we manage that? How do we deal with that? How do we process that? Those are all the things that are across the board, just happening at massive rapid scale. And so, you know, it’s a really difficult time right now to be an MSP or a channel partner, but it’s also an amazing time to be an MSP or channel partner. You know, our world, our capabilities are advancing so fast. You think about one of the simplest use cases that’s out there that all of us think is simple, that MSPs deal with every day, is a circuit outage. You know, a telecom circuit goes down and it’s connected to SD-WAN or it’s connected to a router or it’s connected to some type of device that’s out at the prem. And historically, every MSP on the planet’s dealt with it kind of in a similar way. We get an alert from a monitoring system that feeds a ticketing system. It pops up on a tier one agent’s dashboard. The tier one agent looks at it, they verify power, they verify if the router’s operational, and then they open a ticket with a carrier. And then they, and that’s the hurry up and wait type of world. Well, now in the era of AI, that changes that quite a bit, because every one of those things are very process driven. We don’t need people for that anymore. So now we can have a system take that process flow on, do that. Now, historically, we could use a system to do that. We could write automation and a lot of MSPs did that historically, but the problem with automation is automation is static. When we leverage AI, we can leverage enrichment that helps influence that agentic approach. And so now if there’s a nuance going on, let’s say an example is there’s a global power outage. So let’s say there’s a power outage in the entire Vancouver area. We know that. Well, historically, if we’re looking at that, we see all these customers that are down, we might through a tier one agent approach, a person-based approach that following a process, or even an automated approach, not really correlate that. Because if the MSP is in, let’s say, Montreal, they might not realize there’s a large scale power outage in Vancouver, which is thousands of kilometers away. And so when we think about that, that’s really where these things can change a lot from an agentic perspective. And then the MSP gets the joy of being able to repurpose that person to be much more valuable to their organization, that tier one person can become tier two, and that can really start changing that dynamic a lot.

Robert Dutt: Most MSPs would have historically said we have good visibility across what our customers are doing. And probably I would say most believe they have good visibility today. Where does that confidence most often turn out to be misplaced or to start to break down as the model shifts?

Jeff Collins: Yeah, so I would 100% agree that most MSPs, when workloads are static, have great visibility. The problem is that in today’s world, so many workloads are becoming dynamic. And we see that change happening consistently. You know, customers, you know, historically MSPs had problems monitoring services inside of a cloud provider. You have ephemeral workloads, you have workloads that aren’t necessarily a server, they’re much more like a service. So you have things that might be a Kubernetes instance, they might be a Kubernetes runtime instance, they might be a function. Those are all things that are crucial to the operation of a customer. They’ve taken those workloads that historically operated on a machine. And they’ve taken those workloads and now they’re in some type of small form factor instance that exists for a very short period of time. That’s been very difficult for MSPs to deal with across the board. But now we take that same concept and that same concept goes outside of the cloud providers. We now have that moving into inference nodes. We now have that moving into IoT and IIoT and OT, where we’re starting to deal with these ecosystems where these workloads are very ephemeral by nature. They might exist for a short period or components of those might exist for a short period, or the way that those are correlated and analyzed might exist. But if you think about inside of a customer from a business risk perspective, those actually carry the highest business risk. An individual Windows 2012 server has some level of business risk. If it’s running SAP, probably a higher level of business risk. But if it’s one Active Directory node and the customer has 100 machines in Active Directory, it doesn’t really matter in the scheme of the world. And so those are the realities of what happens as we kind of think through this stuff. And so for MSPs, this really drives that visibility gap. You know, we did a survey earlier this year, or actually late last year, sorry, in 2025. We did a survey across the board asking business leaders really what the visibility gap was and what they believed. And we asked business leaders and we also asked IT. It was really interesting to see kind of the dichotomy. When you ask the business what the visibility gap was, it was extremely high. When you ask technology what the visibility gap is, it was really low. Now they were both technically right. And here’s why. So IT was thinking about the visibility gap of the machines that they understand, the machines in their purview. So those might be, you know, an Active Directory server, a database server, maybe you have a web front end. Those are all there. And those are 100% being monitored to that IT team or to that MSP. The problem is, is the business itself is operating on a whole bunch of additional workloads that IT doesn’t necessarily have purview to. And so because of that, we start ending up with this difference of visibility. And that’s why oftentimes when you’ll go and you’ll talk to a customer or you’ll go and you’ll talk to the business itself. And the business is saying, why do we have this MSP who works for us? This MSP isn’t doing anything. And the MSP is coming back with these great reports that are showing MTTR is consistently dropping. You know, initial response time, triage time is consistently dropping. We’re blowing out every single metric that we provided you in an SLA or an SLO. And the business is coming back and saying, but you’re failing. And the MSP is saying, I don’t understand. We are not. And here’s all the metrics. And it’s because of this difference in resources that exist, that is what is happening. And so I think that’s one of the big areas that we always have to think through is, you know, as we’re looking at things and as MSPs look at things, they have to continue to be pushing upward inside of the business to understand all those areas that the business is driving that IT, who they’ve historically sold to, may not know about those resources, especially in a lot of these other spaces, AI, IoT, IIoT, OT, ephemeral workloads, cloud workloads, those types of things that are often outside of that scope.

Robert Dutt: Yeah. I guess when you’re looking at sort of your visibility stopping basically at the edge of the organization, you’ve got all of this out there, pretty significant impacts on real world issues like latency, like security exposure, like the ability to meet those SLAs that you signed up for, those kinds of things.

Jeff Collins: Yeah. Yeah. 100% agreed. And, you know, when you think about the core components that an MSP does, you know, MSPs generally deal with availability and they deal with performance. When you add in the MSSP, now we add in the security component. And some MSPs and MSSPs are more hybrid-based approaches. They may deal with all three. But as you kind of look at those, those core tenant areas have become much more difficult, especially in the last 10 years, certainly in the last year. I mean, the last year has been so disruptive for all that we do. And it’s because those pieces have become much less simple. You know, if I go back 25 years or even 20 years, customers by and large used MPLS networks, rather simple to monitor. You have guaranteed jitter, you have guaranteed latency, you have, you know, all these things that are very easily assumed by an MSP. So if latency exceeds 74 milliseconds between these two individual locations, that breaks the SLA that the provider provides and it’s an easy conversation. You need to go fix this. This is not okay. Well, in today’s world, most of our customers don’t have MPLS networks. Most of them have, you know, sometimes now it’s satellite. They might have Starlink for LEO. They might have 4G or 5G, depending on what portion of the world they’re in. They might have some type of broadband service, fiber broadband, or copper broadband, or some other type of realm. Well, those don’t necessarily have SLAs for that in any way, shape, or form. We may luck out and they have an availability SLA. Maybe it’s three nines or two nines, or maybe not even two nines, depending on what type of service that is. And then when we start moving inside of the network, outside of the service provider, outside of the circuit provider itself, we start moving into other arenas that look like this. You know, historically we had a Dell server, an HP server that had a mean time before failure. Well, that’s pretty easy to understand. If I have a server and it’s going to run for 25,000 hours, it’s easy to understand that life. But when now we’re starting to get services that have an expected failure, and that expected failure is generally measured in less than a year, because the assumption is that the software, the application, resolves that issue. If you’re an MSP and you’re not monitoring the application and you don’t understand the application, you’re now chasing outages that don’t matter. And that’s one of the other things that’s really hard. And we see this all the time. You know, I’ll talk to MSPs and they’re like, “Jeff,” and it goes back to that same conversation we had before of not knowing the business. “Jeff, we get, today we have 30% of our tickets that become false positives. What do we do about that? We’ve gone out and we’ve bought the newest monitoring platform. We’ve implemented AI. We’ve implemented all this automation. We spent $20 million doing that.” These are all real things that I have in conversations with MSPs. And at the end of the day, they still have 30% false positives that they’re working. And the reality is, is because it’s certainly an outage. There was 100% an outage that happened. But the reality is that outage was never going to get restored because the outage was designed. You know, that workload disappeared. A DevOps team or a DevSecOps team deployed a new environment and that workload is now gone. And there’s a brand new workload that you’re not monitoring right now. You know nothing about it. And those are the things that we all collectively have to continually evolve to. It’s that driving up the stack. You know, one of the things that I often see is, you know, we have this proverbial thing that we’ve all dealt with, the OSI model. You know, there’s seven layers to that OSI model. So often in MSPs, we focus on four of them. The problem is, and most MSPs only focus on the first three. They don’t even focus on the fourth one. The issue is, is there’s three more. And those three more are what get driven by the business. And so the more that we can focus on visibility within those three, understanding that, bringing that into our tools, that drives additional value. It also drives significantly larger margin. You know, if we think about margin contribution at monitoring a telecom circuit, that’s a pretty low margin at this point in time. There’s a lot of automation around that. Monitoring a server – that world used to be high-margin, but it’s compressing. Customers are increasingly doing more of this themselves. They’re doing automation directly into their CI/CD pipeline. So it becomes this knife fight. And there’s more and more MSPs that are out there that are also fighting for that same share of market. And so the key is, the more that MSPs can go up market, they can understand, you know, I hate to use this term digital transformation because it literally gets overused every day by every marketing team on the planet. But the reality is, is that if we go behind this marketing abomination of this term, and we actually look at what happens, there’s a ton of value that we can go after. And if we go after that value, and we go after what people are trying to do, we align with that, we can now take those same products, those same processes that we’ve historically had as MSPs, and we can really start evolving that. Moving upward, driving in significant value, taking our tool sets that we may have today, maybe those can evolve with us, maybe we have to make new changes in our tool sets. But the reality is we’re driving that margin upward. So we’re going from maybe our contribution margin to our business today is 30%, let’s say, we can start moving back up into 60, 70, 80% contribution margin from a managed services perspective, which is where we all want to be. We don’t want to be fighting knife fights for 30%. It’s just hard, it’s difficult. Our customer acquisition costs are still generally high. We have salespeople, we have marketing efforts, we have all those things that we’re burning through every day. And we need more and more market share, we need more and more assets that we’re monitoring. And as a result of that, we need better ways that can contribute higher margin and create stickier customers that we’re not in those knife fights with.

Robert Dutt: The situation seems to be putting MSPs in a situation where they’re increasingly accountable for outcomes that they can’t fully see the contributing factors of. Before you move on, I just wanted to double click on that just a little bit and just ask, how does that change kind of the risk profile for an MSP when you’re accountable for those things that you don’t completely understand or have complete control over?

Jeff Collins: Yeah, I would say a lot of that. And one of the things that MSPs have to think through is a lot of that starts at the sales cycle. If you don’t ask the right questions at the sales cycle stage, oftentimes you get pushed into that ecosystem. When you’re looking at the core functional plumbing behind what a customer is trying to do, and that’s the only thing you’re looking at, you often get siloed into that ecosystem. You’re looking at a server, you’re not looking at SAP. One server going down in SAP doesn’t necessarily mean SAP has a problem. But if that one server is the only HANA server in SAP, that’s catastrophic. You know, it’s this realm of contextual knowledge. Historically MSPs have that contextual knowledge, but it’s all the way at tier three and tier four. That contextual knowledge has to move to tier one. If MSPs want to get to the arena where that is no longer a problem, the contextual pieces have to move downward. You have to go from a hero-based MSP to a process-driven MSP. So many MSPs are built on heroes. It’s really hard to build a scalable business off heroes. You have to have heroes. Heroes are the people that when everything breaks and the world is on fire, they’re the ones who carry you through. And those heroes we want to have, we want to empower them, but they can’t be doing the stuff that should be done at tier one. So if we take that exact same question that you had, Rob, that question is, you know, how do we make, at the end of the day, how do we make MSPs more relevant to their clients and much more aligned with what the client’s trying to do? And that’s by taking the contextual knowledge of what the customer is trying to do, aligning that with the tactical approaches that the MSP is trying to do, and having a very crystal clear playbook of how this tactical component makes up this strategic initiative inside of the business. So we’ll take that, we’ll take that simple example. I shouldn’t say simple. SAP is far from simple. But the reality is, is that SAP is something that customers rely on. And when they rely on that, if SAP goes down the business goes down. And if you have an MSP that’s monitoring that, and at the same second of the same day, the MSP gets 36 tickets. We’ll just pick a random 36 number. 36 severity one tickets come in at that point in time. One of those severity one tickets is for SAP HANA. And the customer only has one instance of that. And that is taking down a large company. So that’s the first ticket. The next 35 tickets are for ephemeral workloads that the customer migrated off of, you got the alert, they migrated to a brand new ephemeral workload. And the 35 don’t matter. They’re false positives. But the one fully matters. In every single MSP on the planet, those 36 tickets are eligible for the same response interval. That’s a pretty tough average to be able to. Are you going to luck out and get the one? Or are you going to luck out, or not luck out, for lack of a better term, and work 35 false positives before you get to the one that matters? Now, most MSPs are going to tell me and they’re going to tell us that, well, we have more than one tier one path. That’s great. But the reality is you need to be responding to that one ticket right now. And you need to understand that that one ticket matters. And the only way you can do that is by starting at the beginning, starting with the sales cycle, understanding what customers are doing. If you’ve already gone down the path and the customer’s embedded, use your customer support teams. Understand what your customers are doing, start layering in that context, start enriching that data, knowing what that actually feeds, and understanding the dependencies and interdependencies inside of that. So if that server goes down, certainly you could by virtue say a database server going down is a SEV-1, but it may not be. If they have four database servers, they’re running in a high availability group, who cares? If one goes down, not the end of the world, go fix it tomorrow. That’s where context, that’s where understanding those dependencies is so crucial. And I mentioned at the beginning of this is how do you take that first step forward? We always take this first step forward and how I instruct MSPs is start doing things like this, take this step forward, break this down into simple programmatic approaches. And when we think about AI, it’s the exact same idea. We move steps forward, we have agentic, we have generative. Pick one, pick an area you want to focus on with your customers, understand the business outcome they’re trying to do. And if you have an inference engine, that’s going to be really crucially important here. So let’s understand that. Let’s monitor that. Let’s understand the intricacies related to how that customer is leveraging it, why it’s important. Are there latency constraints? Are there packet loss constraints? Those types of things. Let’s monitor to that and let’s understand how that happens. And if a customer has an application on the back end, you know, maybe they have New Relic or they have AppDynamics or they have some type of APM toolset, great. Let’s start bringing those into our monitoring. Let’s start bringing that intelligence in, understanding application flows, understanding dependencies, building that to be part of our story. And now we create so much more opportunity for us as an MSP driving that contribution margin northbound.

Robert Dutt: So it sounds like we’re kind of defining good visibility in a modern environment and kind of setting up for looking forward as understanding what actually matters to the customer and understanding what kind of flows into it, what all results in that thing that’s important to the customer still being up, still being running, still being functional, and kind of work backwards from there as opposed to the more “this machine is working, this machine is not” kind of approach.

Jeff Collins: Yep. Yeah. You want to go from tactical to transformational. That’s really the idea.

Robert Dutt: And you shared kind of the idea of the first step to do towards that. I guess as you’re moving towards that first step, you know, is there any one question or kind of mindset that you find works for MSPs to have in mind or asking customers to surface those blind spots and really start to understand what that context is that they have to have?

Jeff Collins: Yeah, that’s a really good question, Rob. And, you know, there’s some things that I do tell MSPs to start with before you ever ask that first question. One of them is kind of some of the simple, let’s call it research that you can do before you ever reach out to your customer. One of the easiest things you can do is start by what industry are they in. You know, in Canada, Canada has a lot of oil and gas, lots and lots of oil and gas companies exist in Canada. And so if you have an oil and gas company, we can start right off the bat with a lot of the things that oil and gas companies live and die with. And we’ll just pick on this one as an example. So oil and gas companies have SCADA networks. They have industrial IoT devices that are out there. They’re processing massive amounts of data. That data may be going into the cloud. It may be going into a data center. It may be going into some type of vault or something like that, depending on what they have. But each one of those are things that, as an MSP, you can start out before you ever ask your customer anything. You know that those are the things that exist in their environment. And you can quickly look and see, well, am I monitoring any of those? Well, no, I’m only monitoring Active Directory. Okay, Active Directory is probably important to the oil and gas company. But if it goes down, do they quit producing oil? The answer is probably no. And so if your answer is ever no, you know right off the bat that you’re not monitoring something that’s strategic to your customer. And so the first thing that you should always think about is, okay, if we have this industry, we should be monitoring the things that are strategic. Well, how do we do that? Well, we start with that one step forward. The first thing we talk to them about is just like when we went out and we sold that initial monitoring of Active Directory, they did it because they didn’t have time for it. There’s no oil and gas company on the planet that has time to be monitoring their SCADA networks. They just don’t. They may tell you that they do, but they don’t. So leverage your relationships, leverage your engagement with them and go after those pieces. Understand, you know, if they’re in AWS IoT Core, understand what that looks like. Understand who’s monitoring that. Understand how DevOps is working within that space. Maybe it’s DevSecOps inside of that environment. Understand that convergence of the teams and then start building a story around, you know, let’s take that on for you. Let’s start changing that. Let’s use the same paradigm that we’ve done, driving MTTR down, driving availability up, driving resolution times down, all those types of things. Let’s bring that into the era of SCADA networks, IoT, our core infrastructure. That’s where we start changing the value inside of our customer engagements. And that’s really where I see a huge opportunity for MSPs across Canada, where you can take that environment, you can take those opportunities you already have, and you can grow them from, you know, maybe you bill that customer $1,000 a month. You can grow it to billing them $20,000 or $30,000 a month, but it’s the most crucial $30,000 they spend. Because, you know, if that offshore environment or that, you know, oil sands environment or whatever it might be within the oil and gas space or in the energy sector, whatever it might be, those things are crucial to their business. And so the more that MSPs can kind of make that step forward, and then also start incorporating AI, every single one of those entities is incorporating AI. They’re incorporating it directly into their pipelines. They’re incorporating it directly into their data pipelines, not just the oil and gas pipelines, but each one of those, the more you can incorporate that, the more you can monitor, the more you can show value of everything that you do amazing as an MSP, that’s really where you start creating that intrinsic strategic value and you get out of that tactical approach.

Robert Dutt: And the good news is for a lot of these folks in the MSP space, presumably they have some of these pieces already in place, just not necessarily connected up to the technical side, i.e. sales and marketing have been focused on a vertical. And even if they haven’t, because they have customers in this space, they’ve built some of that muscle memory, some of that knowledge of what really matters. Now it’s just a matter, hopefully, of connecting it into the services that they’re offering.

Jeff Collins: Yep, totally agreed.

Robert Dutt: All right. Well, it’s been a really interesting look at sort of where visibility is at. And I think a real interesting opportunity that you’ve surfaced in terms of how it can be turned into a value conversation. I appreciate your taking the time.

Jeff Collins: Sounds great. Thanks so much for having me on, Rob.

Robert Dutt: There you have it, my chat with Jeff Collins from WanAware. I’d like to thank Jeff for sharing his insights. The thing that stuck with me from this conversation is how much of what’s changed in the modern network hasn’t been designed in, it’s been bolted on. AI workloads, hybrid architectures, IoT, SCADA, all of it layered into environments without the kind of formal rethinking that happened when we moved to virtualization. And Jeff made a really compelling case that for MSPs, closing that visibility gap isn’t just a risk management play, it’s a revenue opportunity, and potentially a significant one, especially in verticals like energy and critical infrastructure where visibility is tied directly to uptime, safety, and compliance. We’ll be back on Monday with In Case You Missed It, your weekly news roundup. Thanks for listening. I’m Robert Dutt for ChannelBuzz.ca, and I’ll see you in the channel.

Robert Dutt: Hello and welcome to In The Channel from ChannelBuzz.ca, bringing news and information to the Canadian IT solution provider community for the last 16 years now. I’m Robert Dutt, editor of ChannelBuzz.ca, and as always, your host for the show.

Last month, Barracuda released its Managed XDR Global Threat Report, drawing on more than 2 trillion IT events from 2025 to map how attackers are actually getting into networks and what’s making it easier for them. Some of the numbers were striking. 90% of ransomware incidents exploited firewalls. The fastest case went from breach to encryption in three hours. And every single incident the team responded to involved at least one unprotected or rogue device on the network. Today I’m sitting down with Merium Khalid, director of SOC Offensive Security at Barracuda, to dig into what the data actually means for MSPs and the customers they protect. We’re talking about why firewalls keep failing despite years of the same advice, what it looks like when attackers hide inside the legitimate tools MSPs use every day, and where the blind spots are that most organizations don’t even know they have. So let’s get right into it. My chat with Barracuda’s Merium Khalid.

Robert Dutt: Merium, thanks for joining us.

Merium Khalid: Thanks, Rob. Thanks for having me.

Robert Dutt: The report’s been out there for about a month or so, I guess. From your vantage point, running offensive security and in the SOC at Barracuda, what conversations has it sparked with MSPs and with their customers? What’s resonating and what are people still not taking seriously enough?

Merium Khalid: Yeah, great question, Rob. So in terms of the key findings, I think that’s really what the report is focusing on, and that is really what is resonating to our MSPs and our customers and our core customers, is that there is at least one rogue device involved in any of the security incidents that we’ve worked on. And what I mean by a rogue device, it’s basically a device that’s unprotected, unmonitored within your environment. So that kind of becomes like a home or a ground for the threat actor to kind of stay and go under the radar. And I think a lot of our MSPs are finding that interesting. And I think it was one of the most shocking findings as well for us too. It’s the asset management. I don’t think asset management and making sure you are aware of all the assets in your environment, I don’t think that is emphasized enough. And I think that this report kind of makes that in the forefront.

Robert Dutt: A couple of things that can certainly shape customer conversations.

Merium Khalid: Yeah, for sure.

Robert Dutt: One of the headline stats is that 90% of ransomware incidents exploited firewalls, often through old vulnerabilities. The most common detected vulnerability in the report dates back more than a decade, 2013. So this isn’t new advice, but why does this keep happening? Is it a tooling problem? Is it a process problem? Is it a human prioritization problem? Why do we keep running up against these old flaws as current foes?

Merium Khalid: I think it’s both. I think it is a human problem, resource problem, resource gap. It’s also not having proper policies in place. It’s also just the advancements with AI as well. Being able to, threat actors are using it, being able to exploit firewalls at a faster level. And essentially what’s happening here is firewall exploitation is very, very common because it is kind of the low hanging fruit in terms of it’s usually the first public-facing asset in a customer’s environment. So you have people working remotely, so they’re VPNing into their organization’s environment. They’re using some sort of SSL VPN. And SSL VPN, I found, is to be one of the biggest root causes for ransomware attacks because we don’t have the proper tools in place. So there’s no MFA in place, or maybe there is a leaked password out there on the dark web where the account is still active, so no, there isn’t proper account management. So I think it’s not one thing that you can point at like, hey, this is a root cause and this is causing all the problems. I think it’s a combination of people, process, and technology.

Robert Dutt: So if I’m an MSP and I can’t patch everything overnight, especially in multiple customers and complex environments, where should I be triaging firewall risk more intelligently?

Merium Khalid: Well, prioritizing. Prioritizing what are your critical vulnerabilities? If you have a FortiGate firewall, if you have a SonicWall firewall, and there is a zero-day out there, there’s a new vulnerability out there, that is something you want to prioritize right away. But again, you need visibility for that. You need to know that there is a vulnerability out there. So with XDR, what we do is we actually release advisories. So if there is something critical out there, we try to inform our customers as soon as possible. And we have also released a managed vulnerability service as well. So we will scan your environment for any critical or low-medium vulnerabilities and prioritize it in order and give you a report of what you need to patch and how you need to patch it. So having some sort of vulnerability scanning, quarterly, monthly, yearly is very, very important, but also having some sort of visibility as well.

Robert Dutt: In the report, the fastest ransomware case went from breach to encryption in about three hours, if I recall correctly, and 96% of incidents involved lateral movement that ended up in ransomware deployment. What does that timeline say about how realistic it is for an MSP security team to detect, contain, mitigate an attack manually?

Merium Khalid: Even the three hours, I would say, is sufficient time because you don’t want to detect a ransomware attack after the three hours. You want to detect a ransomware attack in the beginning of the attack life cycle. So in the initial act, if they’re trying to brute force your firewall or you’re seeing some sort of suspicious login within your SSL VPN, before they even start moving laterally, you want to detect that before it happens. But again, with XDR, what I think what stands out the most for us is that we have detections across each of the attack phases. So if there is lateral movement, we want to be able to detect that. If they are using some sort of remote code execution or some sort of PsExec tool or some sort of tool to move laterally across the network, we want to be able to detect that with our endpoint detection or our server monitoring. So the three hours may seem like a short time, but it’s actually not. I think most important is detecting early on. So prior to the three hours, detecting at the first phase of the attack rather than the threat actor being there and encrypting.

Robert Dutt: And those things you talked about were the earliest reliable signals that something’s going wrong, but we aren’t to the encryption point yet. Or is there another, this is the thing you should watch for first?

Merium Khalid: Yeah. I mean, again, you want to watch for early signs, right? You want to watch for any sort of privilege escalation that’s happening, any sort of logins from suspicious locations, any sort of spike in your baseline behavior, any sort of brute force activity. I think those are the early signs you want to watch for. But I think the main thing I would say is monitoring. Make sure all your assets, you have server monitoring, EDR monitoring in place. Because a lot of the times, this is actually very important to the data in the report, is these customers that did get hit with Akira or RansomHub or Cactus, they had some sort of gap in the monitoring. So they did not have the full XDR suite deployed. It’s just like protecting a house. You don’t want to just protect the front door. You want to protect the back door and the windows as well. So there was some sort of gap in the monitoring, which then led to the threat actor going undetected. So the first thing you want to do is actually make sure you are monitoring everything, that you have comprehensive monitoring across your environment. And that’ll make it a lot easier to detect the threat actor in the early phases.

Robert Dutt: One of the themes that stood out to me and something that I feel like I’m hearing a lot more recently is the theme of attackers abusing legitimate tools. ScreenConnect, RDP, PowerShell, even to your monitoring point, RMM tools in some cases. And these are tools that MSPs are invested in and living in every day. How should MSPs be thinking about what normal IT behavior looks like in their own network and on their clients’ networks?

Merium Khalid: Yeah, I think that’s a really, really good point. So when it comes to using legitimate tools, you always want to look at who is initiating the usage of a tool. Is it an admin account or is it a service account that’s dedicated to this sort of activity for their regular operations? Usually when it’s associated with some sort of admin account, that can be indicative of malicious activity, but also you want to look at activity before and after, right? So if you have brute force activity, you have privilege escalation, any sort of activity that’s not in the norm, and then you’re seeing the use of like PsExec, RMM tools, RDP, then that could indicate some sort of attack. So I think, yes, it is a kind of tricky area or a blurry area, but that’s where your intelligence and different tactics and techniques come into play, right? So threat actors are known for using these tools so they could go under the radar. But because of that, we’ve learned from all the incident response that we’ve done the different tactics and techniques that they use. So we know what to look for and we know what is suspicious and what is maybe normal business operations.

Robert Dutt: And those are the kinds of things that they should see and kind of immediately see, okay, that’s a red flag. We should drop everything and deal with this urgently.

Merium Khalid: Yeah. Yeah. And I think that’s where you want to make sure you have the right skillset and the right people in place looking at your environment, right? Maybe someone from IT might not have the knowledge or the skillset to identify something that’s malicious or normal. So it’s important to have like a 24/7 SOC in place. It’s important to have your security tools in place so you have people with the right knowledge or the right experience looking at your environment.

Robert Dutt: We touched earlier on the number about basically every incident involving at least one unprotected rogue endpoint. And also this report talked a lot about the number of attacks that had third party involvement, that was two thirds or so, up from less than half a year ago. Along the same note as the tools, MSPs themselves are a trusted third party to their clients. How should they be thinking about the risk that they themselves are introducing into the equation and the risk their clients’ other vendors are introducing, especially in situations where it’s a complex network?

Merium Khalid: Yeah. I think when you are using a vendor, or I mean, everyone is bound to use some sort of vendor or third party tool, right? I think when you are incorporating that in your environment, it’s very, very necessary to make sure you have the right legal and compliance process to make sure that they have, they are doing the best security practices. So making sure they’re SOC 2 audited, making sure they have the right policies in place. So when you’re picking a vendor, I would say, have your legal team involved, have your compliance team involved and do a very comprehensive security review before you kind of incorporate them in your environment. Because yes, like the risk is not just for your organization, the risk carries over to how well is your third party vendor actually practicing the best security practices.

Robert Dutt: For the MSP listening to this and feeling like, okay, my tools are potentially compromised, I could be introducing risks, third parties could be introducing risks. What are two or three changes that an MSP can make in what they do or how they do what they do, that would meaningfully reduce risk without blowing up their own mode of operation basically?

Merium Khalid: Yeah. Yeah. So I think when it comes to key recommendations from the report, of course, there’s a long list of things you could do, but I think what’s going to have the most impact on your environment is having an audit. So auditing all your active accounts, disabling those that are no longer in use, because as I said, that could become a home for threat actors to kind of make their ground and to move laterally. Also audit devices, right? Having a strong asset management policy is very, very important. This will reduce the number of rogue devices that you have. Also having a patch management policy. So as I mentioned before, 96% of incidents that happened with ransomware, it had some sort of vulnerability or exploitation. I think if you have a patch management policy in place, you can reduce that. And I’m not saying to wait for a vulnerability or a zero-day to then implement it. I think having some sort of patch management policy on a weekly or quarterly basis is really important. And someone who’s dedicated to that in your environment. And then also, I think one of the most important things is having a robust security program to prevent these complex threats. Essentially what that means is having that full coverage across your environment. So across endpoints, servers, cloud, network appliances, email appliances, all your Microsoft 365 environments. So the top three things is auditing accounts and devices, patch management, and having visibility and a security program in place to prevent this.

Robert Dutt: The report covers a lot of territory. I think we’ve walked through a lot of the areas that I was kind of most taken by. Any other major takeaways especially for this audience that you’d like to surface in terms of what you found and what it means for the solution provider or MSP?

Merium Khalid: Yeah, sure. So I think one of the things I want to talk about is the report is derived from real life data. So we actually, XDR in 2025 logged more than 2 trillion IT events. And this report is derived from real life data from our customers. So 600,000 security alerts issued to our customers. And then from the 600,000, we had 53,000 high severity alerts that led to an automated threat response. So what that means is we had 53,000 high alerts that led to either blocking a firewall, disabling an account, isolating a network. So we blocked 53,000 high severity incidents that could have led to a very high scale attack in their environment. I think that’s a really important thing to emphasize. And we also protected 230,000 endpoints in 2025. So I think just one of the main things here is the data, the report is derived from real life data and real life findings and from real life engineers and analysts that are right in the forefront of these attacks.

Robert Dutt: It always blows me away when we talk about security metrics and you have these sample sizes of trillions of alerts, of occurrences. It certainly adds to my awareness of that sense of potential for alert fatigue and just the overwhelm of there is so much going on. One last question for me. If MSPs remember three things from this report, from this conversation, what should they be?

Merium Khalid: So three main takeaways is understanding the severity of ransomware. How devastating it can be in your environment. It could literally take your business out if it is a severe enough ransomware. Second, the importance of patch management, making sure all your assets are patched, making sure if you do have public-facing assets in your environment, prioritize that, make that your number one priority. And third, have a security monitoring solution in place. I think that really makes or breaks having the right practices.

Robert Dutt: All right. I appreciate that. Thanks again for taking the time to talk through this and go through some of these results as it relates to the channel community. Greatly appreciate it.

Merium Khalid: Thanks, Rob. Thanks for having me.

Robert Dutt: There you have it, my chat with Merium Khalid from Barracuda. I’d like to thank Merium for sharing the findings of the report and her insights from life in the SOC. If there’s a thread running through this conversation, it’s that the threats aren’t getting more exotic, they’re getting faster. Three hours from breach to encryption, 96% of lateral movement ending in ransomware, and every single incident the team responded to involved at least one device that nobody was watching. The basics still matter. And this report makes a pretty compelling case that audit, patch, and monitor is still where it all starts. Tomorrow on In The Channel, I’m talking to Jeff Collins, CEO of WanAware, about a related problem. The blind spots that form in modern networks as AI workloads and hybrid architectures quietly reshape how traffic moves. If you’ve ever felt that you can’t quite see everything that’s happening inside a customer’s environment, that’s probably a conversation for you. Thanks for listening. I’m Robert Dutt for ChannelBuzz.ca, and I’ll see you in the channel.

Robert Dutt: Hello and welcome to In The Channel from ChannelBuzz.ca, bringing news and information to the Canadian IT channel community for the last 16 years. I’m Robert Dutt, editor of ChannelBuzz.ca, and as always your host for the show.

Microsegmentation has been on a lot of security roadmaps for a while now, but for many MSPs and solution providers, it still felt like something that lives in the enterprise world. Complex to deploy, hard to explain to customers, not always clear where the recurring revenue opportunity is. Zero Networks is looking to change that, and they’re making a big bet on their channel to do it. The company recently went full channel first with an updated partner program called Zero to Sixty, reported 45% year-over-year revenue growth through MSP partners, and earned the only five-star rating in Gartner’s 2026 Peer Insights Voice of the Customer for microsegmentation. Joining me today to talk about all of this is Adam Hofeler, vice president of go-to-market strategy at Zero Networks. We’re going to dig into what the channel first shift really means in practice, where Canadian partners fit into Zero Networks’ plans, and why the conversation around containment and identity segmentation may be more relevant to your next customer meeting than you think. Adam, thanks for taking the time. I appreciate it.

Adam Hofeler: Yeah, good to see you, Robert.

Robert Dutt: Your team recently published research that analyzed three plus trillion activities across 400 enterprise environments, and the big finding was that most security risk comes from routine abuses of normal trusted access paths, and not from the zero-day exploits, the big attention getters. For MSPs and VARs that are listening, what does that actually mean about where the real risk is in customers’ environments right now?

Adam Hofeler: Yeah, that’s a good question. I think when you look at it, we already know that most customers or end users, the bad guys are already in their organization in some form or fashion. They just don’t know it yet. So that if when you look at a security stack that might have detection and response capabilities and some other of those high valued propositions, because when we look at what we do, we’re one piece of the puzzle. But when you look at that, we know that exists. And we already, I think most people say, assume the breach is how fast you can kind of detect it. So when we look at what we do from a technology perspective, we help that blast radius, right? We help organizations prevent attacks, we minimize that blast radius, we maintain business continuity, even when attackers are already inside. So I tell our partners and MSPs to say, “Hey, look, we all agree that something is going to happen, but how do we control that? What does that look like?” And that’s really where Zero Networks comes in.

Robert Dutt: And that’s, you know, you touch on sort of going from detect and respond to what I’ll call sort of contained by default as an approach there. How do you explain that shift to a partner who’s kind of built their practice around EDR, around a traditional SOC stack, that kind of thing?

Adam Hofeler: Yeah. So our motion today is not like, “Hey, look, displace all these things that you’ve sold your customers today. That doesn’t make sense.” But most of our customers are being asked from a compliance standpoint or regulatory compliance standpoint to do, “Hey, I don’t love using the term, but the zero trust architecture or platform pieces of it, right? That’s a real thing.” And we’re one piece of that puzzle, although a very, very big piece. So when I talk to partners of like, “Hey, look, things that still matter to end users are protecting uptime, revenue, safety while meeting compliance requirements amid financial and operation cyber risks. It exists today.” And regulatory and compliance pieces are still coming down, even though they’ve sold multiple various technologies in cyber. So we’re really good at helping them solve that piece in parts. There are times where we talk about, “Hey, look, this is what an EDR does. This is what we do. This is why we work well together, and we’re not telling you not to have an EDR.” But we also look at it as if you look at all the breaches, and again, we’re not trying to scare anybody, but if you look at all the breaches, almost all of them had an EDR. They all had some kind of technology in that stack, but it didn’t prevent what had happened from a breaching perspective, and we really control that.

Robert Dutt: Okay. On the partner program side of things, you’ve moved from, I think it was around 20% partner led to 100% channel first over the course of three years. To step back in time a little bit, what either broke or didn’t work about the old model that led you down that path?

Adam Hofeler: Yeah. It was more of a people-type scenario when we started three years ago, we were a younger company, but didn’t have the people or process. We didn’t really have a programmatic approach, and we didn’t have relationships in the partner community. So I don’t view it as a fault of Zero Networks at all, but when I came in and the hiring that we’ve done with the team on the go-to-market side as well as our sales, we really just kind of dug our trenches in to say, “Hey, look, the partner community is where we want to be. They do a fantastic job. They’ve got great relationships. They’ve got technical resources. Let’s embrace it.” So it wasn’t that we were shying away from it. We were just a much, much smaller company. And so with the growth of the people that we brought on board, allowed us to say, “Okay, now we are ready to kind of really do this and focus and concentrate to making sure that the partners not only are happy, but focus on what will make them grow even further or faster with us.”

Robert Dutt: A tale as old as time, I think, in the channel space, the sort of company starts to build up direct to some level, then realizes, “Okay, how do we multiply this?” And that’s when you bring in folks who understand the channel and start to build that out. Totally familiar. And that’s exactly it.

Let’s talk about Zero to Sixty, the program update specifically. So if I’m a VAR or MSP that’s already working with you guys, what are the two or three changes that I’m going to feel most immediately in how I sell, how I deliver, and how I work with you?

Adam Hofeler: You’ll get additional registration or partner protection, not only on the length of time, but the dollars in which you’re going to be protected. So there’s usually some money, financial pieces tied to it. So most individual partners like that. From a company perspective for those partners, we have set an alignment of marketing dollars affiliated with that. So there’s some good things that we can do based on marketing with our partners, having end user events or various things internally as well. Do we have that available to us? And the third thing is enablement, not only on the sales, but the technical side. So those partners that can really embrace our technology, learning it from a technical perspective, we’ll reap some benefits along those lines as well.

Robert Dutt: Deal reg and pricing friction in general are perennial pain points or points of discussion in the industry. You’ve talked publicly about mandatory deal registration and no direct competition with partners. I guess the question is, as you scale that, how do you enforce that structurally and culturally?

Adam Hofeler: Yeah. It’s a big thing for me and for our company. When we talk about it, in my time of doing something like this, partners really want a couple of things. They want trust. Trust not only from the company, but from the people that they do business with at the field level. They want to be profitable. They want to make money because there’s a lot of technologies that they don’t make as much money, but it’ll cost them just as much on their time, energy, and effort, the value of time. And they want to make sure the technology works. So they can go and sell something else and they can have happy customers. So there’s three things that play a part in that. So we’re really trying to solve those three things and make sure that it’s sustaining, not just for our first year of changing the Zero to Sixty model, but making it a long-lived solution for them that they had a good experience so they’ll keep coming back and back and tell their friends within the organization to say, “Great experience, treated us well, made some good money, and oh, by the way, I’ve got a happy customer.”

Robert Dutt: You reported 45% year over year growth in MSP partnerships. Just to clarify there, is that growth in number of MSPs and revenue through MSPs both? What’s the point there?

Adam Hofeler: Good question. Yeah, the 45% growth was in revenue from the MSPs, and we’re looking to actually double that this coming year in revenue. We are not looking to scale and grow to just be MSP-centric, but it is a big focus and attention for us. Our technology does lend itself to a great MSP practice. In this space, not a lot of MSPs have the chance and opportunity to leverage microsegmentation based on some other providers and their complexity of the way they can do it. For us, we’ve solved that issue, so we really want to get out in front of the MSP and MSP practice. For those companies that are interested from a partnering perspective, we’d love to talk to them and see where it goes. Making it profitable will have its own separate, unique process from a pricing perspective and procedure, let alone what the technology can do for their end users from a manageability perspective when they manage that.

Robert Dutt: You’ve described the MSP opportunity as shifting from reactive incident response to a recurring resilience kind of position. Practically speaking, what does that service look like and what is the MSP actually delivering on an ongoing basis once the initial containment deployment is done?

Adam Hofeler: Yeah, so we have the unique ability to produce a risk assessment report so an MSP can show their end users the value that this technology is bringing them from a security, from a compliance piece. Manageability is pretty light on the MSP piece. Our system has an automation approach to what we do and how we do it, so that it takes some hours away from our MSP to focus on maybe some other things while the technology really can help them deliver some of the other initiatives that they might have. While we continue to tag all the assets, which is a challenge in the microsegmentation world, as well as building rules and policies that the MSP would have to do, now our technology can take that burden off of them for the most part. So it’s really helping our MSPs hit a core, I guess, end user state for them, not leveraging maybe all the services that they might have had on another technology. So really a lot of big value added to an MSP and to end users.

Robert Dutt: One angle that I think MSPs – MSPs anywhere – are interested in right now is cyber insurance. Insurers are increasingly requiring proof of segmentation and zero trust controls before issuing or renewing a policy. How are you seeing partners use that fact as sort of a door opener with customers who might not otherwise consider this a priority?

Adam Hofeler: Yeah, great question. When we do see it, there are some times where cyber insurance comes and we’ve been able to reduce some of that cost for cyber insurance because they have our technology. So there’s a benefit for the end users, I don’t want to say quite immediately, but once they find out that they do have a zero trust or microsegmentation strategy, because at the end of the day, we reduce downtime and minimize serious incident costs. We lower incident severity and faster recovery, improve executive confidence from a governance posture perspective. So these are all things that cyber insurance agencies are looking at that we can accomplish with our technology. So one, I’m thankful that we have it, but two, we do see that question come up. I’ll say maybe 20% these days with that number probably only growing at an exorbitant amount based on the relevance of that cyber insurance question that you asked.

Robert Dutt: Let’s zoom in on Canada a little bit. The press release announcing the Zero to Sixty developments mentions distribution partners in Europe, Australia, Japan, some major US-based enterprise partners. I didn’t see Canada specifically called out, but can you help me out with what the channel footprint actually looks like here in Canada today and especially where you need more help from Canadian partners, whether that’s geographically, whether that’s vertically, whether that’s whatever measure.

Adam Hofeler: Yeah. If I say all over, would that be too much, Robert? When you’re a fast growing company, there’s different areas of focus that you have, right? And we don’t have anybody from a Zero Networks perspective based in Canada. So everything has been through the partners and the partner community. We’ve had interest there and we do have some partners today. It is a great market for us. And we are kind of diving in this year in 2026 more into the Canada market in the major markets. And my ask would be if there’s a partner that’s interested in a fast growing cybersecurity company unique in the market and industry, we’d love to talk to them. So that’s typically in the major markets, but we’re not excluding anyone that might have some great customers that are interested in the product or services that we offer. So the partners that we have today, there’s a few that are headquartered and based in Canada, but some of them are the national partners that cover all of North America that we have today.

Robert Dutt: For Canadian partners who are evaluating the space, there are some established players – Illumio, Akamai Guardicore, those kinds of folks. You guys are combining network segmentation with identity segmentation, restricting admin and service account access, and not just network traffic. How do you explain that distinction to a partner who thinks, “All right, I’ve already got microsegmentation covered.”

Adam Hofeler: Yeah, it’s not easy, by the way. I think sometimes we have a preconceived notion of, “Oh, I already have that already,” or, “I have this technology and they do that.” And we have to take a step back and say, “Well, they do parts of it and not completely.” So yeah, with our unique approach of having an identity-based access enforcement at the network layer with just-in-time access for administrative and lateral movement pathways, this allows us to kind of dive into deeper of what network segmentation is and identity segmentation is. By default, we close privileged ports or privileged access, and then only when the customer identifies themselves will we open to that. So I take the scenario as such of, “Hey, look, you have some of these other providers. That’s great.” There’s three superhero things that we do differently. One, we don’t have an agent, so you don’t have to worry about it from an agent approach and sending agents across the entire infrastructure. So right away, partners like that, “Oh, okay, now I don’t need an agent.” The second piece that’s one of our superpowers is we have an automation engine, and the automation engine tags all the assets and builds the rules and policies, which customers in the past have been a big, big challenge, and then I have that just-in-time MFA aspect of things. So I tell the partner that’s just learning about microsegmentation is you have a neighborhood, and if there’s bad guys who are trying to get into one of the houses, what do they look for? They look for an open garage or a window or a screen door, whatever the case might be. That doesn’t mean that the house doesn’t have some protection around it. It’s got a fence. It might have a dog. You might have a Ring camera. All of that helps. So what we do is we’re like, “Hey, look, if someone gets in because you left a screen door open or a window open, they walk into that room. They won’t be able to move, and if they want access to open the door, they’ll have to identify themselves with who they are.” So I try to put in some terms of those folks that may know what we do from a network and identity segmentation and kind of go a little bit deeper. Or if I’m just starting out from a partner and they’re looking for something in their portfolio, I use that house analogy because it usually lets them understand it just a little bit easier to say, “Hey, look, I’m in a neighborhood. Bad guys want to find the easiest way.” Once they find a way, we just prevent anything from happening anywhere else in the house.

Robert Dutt: Identity segmentation feels particularly relevant, particularly in the sweet spot for MSPs that are in Active Directory heavy environments with lots of service accounts today. How quickly do you find partners can deploy that and start to show customers measurable risk reduction when they start with you?

Adam Hofeler: In the identity aspect of things, within two weeks. Once we’re implemented, we’ll be able to gather most of the information that we need from a service or an admin accounts, which is a big challenge for most of these companies and organizations where they don’t know where anything is or where they sit or who might have access. Within two weeks, we’d be able to identify it. Now, it’d be easy for me to say right away or immediately, and that is the case. But for the identity piece of our platform, usually we say seven to 10 days.

Robert Dutt: You guys earned a five-star rating in this year’s Gartner Peer Insights Voice of the Customer for the microsegmentation space. The only vendor to score a perfect 100 and 100% willingness to recommend, that’s a nice piece of business for you. What’s one piece of customer feedback from that process that surprised you or changed how you think about the product?

Adam Hofeler: Man, I will go to my very first week of being at Zero Networks. I come meet our CEO, Benny, up in New York. I’m at a customer site. This is where I’m meeting him. I’m in the conference room, and the CIO says, “We love your product.” And I’m still new. I really don’t know exactly what we do, to be honest with you, Robert. I’m like, “Okay, I love hearing that. That’s good.” He absolutely gushed for five or 10 minutes about our product and who we are and what we do and how we’ve helped their organization. I’m like, “All right, this is great.” We go to a dinner that night, and there’s probably a room of 20 individuals, about 20% of the room is a customer of Zero Networks and the others are prospects. And they could not stop raving about our product. And I look to a colleague to the side of me, I’m like, “What’s happening here?” Really, where did I just go? Customers just sing our praises. And so that set the tone for me being here for almost three years of customers really love what we do. And it’s great that we have a technology that customers love it, but we’re actually solving a business challenge they have and they’ve had. And it became a reckoning to say, “Our technology really does it.” So we are growing very, very fast and it’s primarily because our customers are recommending us to other customers. They talk about their challenges that they might’ve had. They talked about how we solved it and how quickly we’ve had the ability to solve it. So to some degree, I thought I was in the Twilight Zone the very first day and it continues to grow and manifest itself as we continue to grow. And so when we talk about the five-star rating and how customers really sing our praises, it’s very much true. I haven’t had this in my sales career for quite some time that if I put a customer on the phone and I just hop off, I really feel that whoever they’re talking to is going to become a Zero Networks customer as well, just because it’s not just the technology works, but how do we support them? What is our sales engagement? How does our partner community embrace them? It’s great you have technology, but if we gouge them in some form or fashion or they felt uneasy about it, they wouldn’t recommend us.

Robert Dutt: Two quick ones before we wrap up here. You’re talking about expanding in Canada, expanding the MSP business. It sounds like there’s opportunity there. If I’m a Canadian MSP listening and I wanted to start a conversation tomorrow, what’s the literal first step that you’d recommend they take to engage with you guys?

Adam Hofeler: Yeah, they can reach us on our website that would go to our go-to-market team or an email at partners@zeronetworks.com would be the very, very first step. And again, if they’re just trying to learn about the technology or interested, let’s have a conversation and see if it’s the right mutual fit for not only Zero Networks, but for them to be brought into their portfolio.

Robert Dutt: All right. And we have to ask this one. The partner program is called Zero to Sixty. I love that branding. It’s a cute little bit of marketing business, but here in Canada and other metric markets, Zero to Sixty just doesn’t have the same ring to it. It’s like a nice drive down a country road. Any chance we’ll see a Zero to 100 program for Canadian partners?

Adam Hofeler: And if you like that, maybe we need to. I think I’m in. We would love to do nothing more but to gain more access to partners. And if it’s the naming convention that works, I’m in. Whatever works.

Robert Dutt: Adam, I appreciate you taking the time. Thank you.

Adam Hofeler: Thanks, Robert. Appreciate the time.

Robert Dutt: There it is. My conversation with Adam Hofeler from Zero Networks. If there’s a line from this conversation that I think is worth sitting with, it’s that most security risk isn’t coming from exotic zero-day exploits. It’s coming from routine abuse of normal trusted access paths. That’s a finding from over 3 trillion activities across 400 enterprise environments. And it makes a pretty strong case for the shift from detect and respond to contained by default isn’t just marketing language. If microsegmentation is on your radar, whether as a security play or as a way to open cyber insurance conversations with your customers, maybe Zero to Sixty is worth a look for you. Tomorrow on In The Channel, I’m sitting down with Merium Khalid from Barracuda’s SOC to go through their managed XDR threat report, including the finding that 90% of ransomware incidents exploited firewalls, often through vulnerabilities more than a decade old. That’s tomorrow right here on ChannelBuzz.ca. Thanks for listening. I’m Robert Dutt for ChannelBuzz.ca, and I’ll see you in the channel.

Welcome to In Case You Missed It from ChannelBuzz.ca. I’m Robert Dutt, editor of ChannelBuzz.ca. Today is Monday, March 16th, 2026. Let’s get your week started right.

This week’s In Case You Missed It is brought to you by ESET Canada. ESET’s Women in Cybersecurity Scholarship is now open for 2026, with three $5,000 awards available to women pursuing careers in cybersecurity. Applications close April 8th. Learn more and apply at eset dot come slash ca. ESET – protecting progress.

If you needed a single data point to explain the mood in the channel right now, Omdia may have just provided it. A new global survey from the analyst firm found that close to 60 percent of channel partners expect their Q1 profits to decline by double digits compared to last year. Less than a third predict that profits will grow at all.

The revenue picture is slightly more encouraging – 45 percent expect Q1 revenues to increase year over year, and about a third are forecasting double-digit revenue growth. But there’s a dangerous disconnect between topline and bottom line, and the reason is straightforward: costs are rising faster than partners can pass them through.

Hardware vendors are increasingly refusing to hold pricing until the point of shipment, and in some cases are cancelling orders even after a purchase order has been received. If you’re locked into contractual pricing with a customer, you quoted a price, the vendor changed theirs, and you’re absorbing the difference.

Layer in Middle East conflict pushing oil prices higher, component shortages showing no signs of easing for at least another 12 months, and the downstream effects on cloud providers, MSPs, and SaaS companies all being forced to raise their own prices – and Omdia’s Alastair Edwards warns the risk of channel bankruptcies is set to increase dramatically. If you haven’t stress-tested your quoting and procurement processes for a world where vendor pricing is no longer reliable, that conversation needs to happen now.

Check Point Software launched a dedicated Canada data region last week for its CloudGuard Web Application Firewall. All configurations, logs, and security data generated by Canadian customers using CloudGuard WAF will now stay within Canadian borders.

This is a data sovereignty play, and the timing isn’t accidental. Data residency is becoming a real differentiator in how Canadian organizations evaluate security vendors. Whether it’s regulatory pressure, customer demand, or the reality that storing data with U.S.-headquartered cloud providers carries CLOUD Act risk, the partners who can have an honest conversation about where data lives are the ones winning deals.

For Check Point partners, it removes one of the more common objections. And in a broader sense, it’s another signal that global security vendors are recognizing that having a data region in Canada actually matters to this market.

CRN published its annual MSP 500 list last week, and several Canadian companies made the cut. WBM Technologies out of Saskatoon landed on the Elite 150 – now in its 75th year and still reinventing itself. Bulletproof, a GLI company based in New Brunswick, made the Security 100. Nucleus Networks, which has expanded from Vancouver to five cities across Western Canada, appeared on the Pioneer 250. Arctiq, Converge, and Premier Cloud also showed up across the three categories.

We don’t dwell on awards lists on this podcast, but the MSP 500 is one of the few that gives Canadian partners real visibility alongside the larger U.S. players. If you’re building your practice and wondering whether you’re on the right track, it’s worth looking at who made it and asking what they’re doing that you could learn from.

Since our friends at ESET Canada are sponsoring this episode, it’s worth flagging something they’re doing that goes beyond product. The ESET Women in Cybersecurity Scholarship is now open for 2026, with three $5,000 awards available to women in Canada pursuing careers in cybersecurity. The deadline to apply is April 8th.

This is the 11th year of the program. 

Since 2021, ESET has supported 14 women in Canada with more than $50,000 in scholarship funding. Last year’s Trailblazer recipient, Constance Prevot, is now a working SOC analyst while finishing her degree at Concordia. If you know someone who should apply, point them to eset.com/ca. Link’s in the show notes.

Finally, two moments from the past week that remind us this industry is built by people, not just products.

The Canadian channel lost Rob Megaw last week. Rob was the president of Compu-SOLVE Technologies in Midland, Ontario, and had led the company for more than 30 years – from its early days as a local ISP and PC repair shop through its evolution into a managed services provider. That’s the Canadian channel story in miniature, and our condolences go out to his family and the Compu-SOLVE team.

On a more hopeful note, CIOCAN announced the CanadianCIO Fawn Annan Memorial Award, recognizing women in IT leadership whose work reflects Fawn’s enormous contribution to Canada’s technology community. Fawn founded the CanadianCIO of the Year Awards and the CIO Hall of Fame. Nominations are open, and we’ll have a link in the show notes.

Those are some of the things we were paying attention to last week. 

This week on In The Channel: Zero Networks goes all-in on the channel and why Canadian partners should pay attention. Barracuda’s Merium Khalid walks us through their latest threat report. And Jeff Collins from WanAware makes the case that you’re hitting every SLA metric and your customer still thinks you’re failing. 

For ChannelBuzz.ca, I’m Robert Dutt. Have a great week, and I’ll see you in the channel.

Robert Dutt: Hello and welcome to In The Channel from ChannelBuzz.ca. I’m Robert Dutt, editor of ChannelBuzz.ca, joining you for a special Friday episode. Thanks for pressing play.

On March 14, 2006 – Pi Day, for those keeping track – Amazon Web Services launched S3, its first generally available cloud service. Tomorrow marks 20 years since that moment, and whether you were paying attention to AWS back then or not, it’s hard to argue that any single technology shift has reshaped the channel more than cloud.

To mark the occasion, I sat down with someone I’ve known for close to 20 years in this industry – Eric Gales, the president of AWS Canada. Eric’s been at the center of pretty much every major platform shift in the channel. He ran Microsoft Canada during the cloud push, led VMware Canada, and has been heading up AWS Canada since 2015. So there aren’t many people better positioned to reflect on what the last two decades of cloud have meant for Canadian partners, and where AI is taking things next.

This one’s a conversation, not an interrogation. I hope you enjoy it. Here’s Eric Gales from AWS Canada.

Eric, thanks for taking the time. I appreciate it.

Eric Gales: My pleasure, Rob. Great to talk to you.

Robert Dutt: We’ve known each other for quite a while, going back to your Microsoft Canada days, and it’s been close to 20 years now. Before we get into AWS at 20, when you look over the arc of your career in Canada – Microsoft, VMware, AWS – you’ve been fortunate enough to be with and to lead some really transformative companies. What’s the single biggest thing that you’ve seen that’s changed about how technology gets to market here in Canada over those two decades?

Eric Gales: Yeah, you know what, as you indicated, it’s been fascinating. It’s been super fun to be in the tech sector. I’ll take a few things. One is, I think about it as eras of computing. I actually started at the dawn of the PC era, the end of that mid-range era. The PC changed everything, and then local area networking, and the internet, and mobile computing. Then my time in Canada – when I first came to Canada I worked for Microsoft, and I worked for Compaq before I came to Microsoft.

In this era, technology has only become more important to more customers. That’s one storyline, is that it’s become more and more important. One thing I think is the most profound change in recent times is, it was always just the domain of technologists. I was working for technology companies, selling to technologists. Now, because the impact of technology is so profound, it’s a lot more about businesses, and business leaders, and lines of business understanding what the technology can do. I think that’s been the biggest evolution, and certainly in the last decade, is the importance that everybody within an organization appreciates the importance of technology, and what it can do, and how to apply it.

Robert Dutt: That has been pretty transformative for the channel, hasn’t it? Selling into line of business, selling into the C-suite rather than going to the CIO. That’s a good point. For all the technology changes, that’s kind of been the thing, right? Not a technology, but rather the “who cares about it” part of it.

Eric Gales: Exactly. I think, just like as someone in this business myself, if I look out to that partner ecosystem, they’ve been on that same transformation that creates new challenges for every partner, as well as new opportunities. Those that have been most successful have of course been the ones that continue to evolve their businesses to meet the needs of, ultimately, the end customer.

Robert Dutt: When AWS launched S3 back on Pi Day 2006, I don’t think many folks in the Canadian channel were paying attention on that day in particular. As you moved through your career path, when did you first realize, “Okay, cloud isn’t a buzzword. This is a fundamental change both in technology, and it’s going to rewire the channel”?

Eric Gales: Yeah, I think there were two things back then. One was, at the time, of course, Amazon was not synonymous with being a technology provider. It was a consumer of technology. So point one was, “Amazon’s launched something.” I didn’t work for them then, and I would be in that community that says, “Why would you buy those services from a bookseller?”

So that was one dimension of it. And then the second thing was, there had been managed services before, but I think the thing that a lot of people missed for a while was, a few things had changed. The internet was ubiquitous. People were using the internet for lots of different things. And so it was that new transport that the internet gave you that enabled a company like Amazon to come along with AWS and offer a service that was available to everybody.

And then it also changed the way that people thought about consumption. Because up until that point, most software and consumption of services was a long-term contract or a license. And this was pay as you go, use on demand. It was a whole new construct. And I think it took a while for people to realize that AWS had changed a whole set of characteristics about how technology was going to be consumed.

And the rest is history. That whole idea took off because it just made so much sense to customers, and many partners got behind that very quickly in terms of seeing the opportunity to transform how they interacted with their own customers.

Robert Dutt: You’ve said, and I don’t think this is too much of a secret to the industry, to anyone who’s observed the Canadian business and technology scene, that Canadian businesses are slower to adopt new technology than especially the US, but also European counterparts. There’s that kind of tendency to let someone else see where the mines are in the minefield before you go walking. Looking back over 20 years of cloud in Canada, do you think that gap has closed, or has that sort of conservative approach to technology shifted forward to a new frontier? Are we going to see the same thing with AI now?

Eric Gales: I think, you know what, when I first started working over here with the cloud 10 years ago, a lot of my conversations were about why cloud and why it was important, both with partners and end customers. And at that time, I had felt this sort of theme that Canada was slower to adopt technology. And I felt there was a real opportunity there because everyone was at the beginning. And so here’s an opportunity for us to take these capabilities to our customers and help them to play catch up with other jurisdictions.

And I learned back then – I’d already learned by then – that it was important to point to Canadian customers to make it okay. To avoid the sort of “first to be second” thing. “Canadian customers are doing this.” And so we went out of our way early on to get key brands on our platform in every industry so we could make it okay.

But I’d say in aggregate, yes, we’ve made a huge amount of progress, but the Canadian landscape moved a little bit more slowly than other jurisdictions. I see the same opportunity now, but the landscape has changed, the circumstances have changed. I think politically, geopolitically, there’s a new opportunity, particularly with AI. And I think there’s a great opportunity for Canada, for Canadian firms, for Canadian government, and for Canadian partners to take this opportunity to really see if we can accelerate the consumption and the application of this technology to real business problems and productivity challenges.

And again, once again, the world is all at the same starting point. So I think there’s a great opportunity here to accelerate the Canadian adoption of these kind of capabilities in this next era.

Robert Dutt: One of the things that certainly arguably helped close that gap, helped make cloud much more de rigueur here in Canada, is that we kind of eliminated the “okay, so my data is going to live where?” question. For you guys, rolling out Montreal in 2016, I think it was, and Calgary a couple years ago – not just data center announcements, these were things that unlocked data residency and sovereignty conversations that Canadian partners and their customers really needed. As those conversations shift from “where does my data live” to “who controls my AI models and my training data,” how does that change the work that partners do and how they frame that to customers?

Eric Gales: Yeah, I think it’s interesting again, but go back to the history of it here. Many things have changed that have stayed the same. The importance of security – that hasn’t changed. Arguably, it’s more important. The management and the financial controls of technology they might be using – those haven’t changed. They’ve changed the application of those, but there are some key themes.

This question of sovereignty and control of one’s data and the policies around it – those things are very important. They were very important to us. One of the reasons that we built our infrastructure here is the control of this for our customers.

That’s why in this AI era, the same things apply. And so we’re super focused on maintaining the same principles that allow customers to use these models with their data in a secure way. That means that their IP doesn’t leak out somewhere. We don’t use their data for anything else. And so to us, the same philosophical approach and the same technical approaches to making sure that customers can be confident that there’s a way of taking advantage of all of these capabilities without compromising the security, the privacy, and their own intellectual property. That is a key feature of our value proposition to our customers – we help you get all of the benefits of these capabilities without the risks associated with using models which sort of live on the internet somewhere.

Robert Dutt: For Canadian VARs, MSPs, folks who’ve been around since the early days of cloud, the ones who made that transition from selling boxes to selling services – what did the ones who succeeded have in common? And sort of the flip side of that as well, what did the ones who struggled to make that transition miss?

Eric Gales: Yeah, I mean, I think – you’ve heard me say this before, Rob – but I’m a maniacal believer that the only sustainable competitive advantage is innovation. And whatever business you’re in, if you’re not innovating, if you’re not willing to change, then you’re losing. It’s just at what rate.

And that’s not a new problem. I’d put it out there that, think of any company that you knew that was top of its game and then it wasn’t. In whatever industry, I would posit that you could trace it to a lack of innovation on product, customer service, supply chain, whatever. And that’s the case with the IT sector and with partners. If you think that you’re going to be able to hold the tide back in a world that’s changing, that’s going to come to a stop.

And I’d say the characteristic of those partners that were able to most benefit from these eras of computing were those that were prepared to transform how they were going to make money, where they were going to make money, what they were going to contribute to their customers. And those that didn’t do that are the ones that typically end up in a position where their business isn’t sustainable anymore because that market went away.

When I started in the industry, my first job, I was an installation engineer, and there’ll be some people out there – maybe you’re one of them – that remember, we used to put Harvard graphics cards into PCs. People paid money for us, for me, to do that work. And then, you know, graphics cards came in the PC. And so that business went away. And that’s the case. Where the money can be made, where you can build a profitable business, it’s been evolving.

But the actual surface area to build businesses and be partners that help customers translate this technology into value for them – that opportunity has only got bigger. And that’s the case today. If you think about the potential for AI and AI services, there’s just a tremendous opportunity out there for partners to help customers translate these capabilities into value for their businesses.

Robert Dutt: You guys have talked about partners being the lifeblood of AWS, I think the language that the leadership team has used. The fact that partners are generating $7 for every dollar of AWS service sold. That’s a great number. But for a Canadian MSP who’s in that long tail of the channel, that isn’t a Deloitte or an Accenture – maybe they’re a 15-person shop in the GTA or Calgary or wherever they may be – what does that $7 actually look like for them, and where is that value being created?

Eric Gales: Yeah, I’d say there’s a few different areas. So if you think about the continuum, there are many customers out there who have yet to move their on-premises infrastructure to the cloud. And so there is a whole decade’s worth of work or more in helping customers to transform what they’re doing on-prem into the cloud. And there’s a necessity to do that, because the opportunity to leverage these new sets of capabilities like AI, for example – they have a dependency on having proximity of your data to these cloud services.

And so at one end of the spectrum you’ve got migrations and modernizations of legacy technologies and architectures to the cloud. And at the other end of the spectrum, there’s building new capabilities, using the features of the cloud, using these new capabilities with AI. And we see three big categories there: helping businesses generate more employee productivity, helping streamline business processes and doing new processes in new ways, and then also thinking about new business models.

And so there’s a continuum. The technology itself is a set of tools that can be applied to every business. But the services around that, the people and process part – that’s where that $7 is. That $7 is the people and process, largely, around helping customers to adopt and deploy and take advantage of these capabilities.

And then there’s both the SI partners and then ISVs that live on the AWS platform. And we’ve tried to create new opportunities for those too, with things like Marketplace, to help our customers be able to consume software from our partners that build software that runs on AWS too.

Robert Dutt: You guys rolled out some pretty significant program changes for 2026 – growth incentives, different benefits, changes to deal registration. For a partner who’s been doing this for a while, what’s sort of the biggest practical change they’ll feel day to day this year in terms of being an AWS partner?

Eric Gales: Yeah, I think a lot of those changes are built in sympathy to what we were hearing from our partners and from our customers, to allow us to streamline the way that we’re working with our partners, to allow us to focus more explicitly in solution areas as well as specific industries.

Think back to some of my opening comments at the beginning there – it’s more important than ever to be able to translate these capabilities into the language of the customer. And so we have a lot of focus on industry, for example, to help our customers put this technology into context.

And so thematically, we’re trying to translate everything we’re learning from our partners and our customers into programming that allows us to jointly focus on the right things. And for us to make sure we’re getting the right support to the right partners in the right places to help them to scale their business.

We think this next era of compute, particularly led by AI, provides a tremendous new opportunity for our partners to translate this technology into value for our customers. And so we’re trying to line up our execution and programming in a way that is much clearer, simpler to engage with, more transparent about what we think is important, and allows us to get the right support to the right people at the right time.

Robert Dutt: You talked about the idea of AI kind of resetting that starting line, creating a new starting point where everyone’s on a more even footing because, like we were with cloud, it’s a new start. A lot of MSPs that I talk to are still figuring out the basics of it – the where to start, what’s real, what’s hype, how do I find value for my customers? I think you touched on that a little bit in the last answer. But if you were advising a Canadian MSP right now on their first meaningful AI conversation with a customer, what would you tell them to focus on?

Eric Gales: I think it’s all about business value. Whenever you have a new era of technology like this, there are a bunch of people just trying to sell stuff. And customers want this stuff to be translated into value for them. And so I think really looking for where is the business value of the application of this technology, and being the translator of that for customers.

Because there are tremendous opportunities for AI and generative AI and symbolic AI and machine learning to be applied in whole new ways with our customers. And what we’re finding is our customers need help to translate that into value for them.

And so the real opportunity is to identify where are the sweet spots today that you can take a value proposition to a customer that is all about real business value and the “how” part. How do they get that value?

And so I think at this stage, that is most important. There’s a high noise-to-signal ratio right now in this world because it’s moving so quickly. And customers are looking for people that can help to translate all of this noise into signal that’s valuable to them. And so that’s my general advice: find the opportunities where you can translate all of this stuff into real business value, whether that’s a particular use case, a particular portfolio of customers. And at the same time, every partner needs to have a business model here, a business that supports scaling and growing into the future, to translate this opportunity into business value for themselves.

Robert Dutt: And sort of the flip side of that, what’s the biggest risk for a Canadian partner who looks at it and says, “Okay, still early in the game, going to wait for clarity”?

Eric Gales: Yeah, I’d say that there can be no waiting. What we’re finding is that every customer, every partner needs to get moving. There’s a huge amount to be learned by doing here, and every era of compute that you and I have been involved in and the IT sector, it has gone at a faster rate than the previous one. And this one is going at a rate that we’ve never seen before.

I think last year, 160,000 customers volunteered that they are adopting some form of AI. And that’s the highest rate of adoption we’ve ever seen of any technology, including internet and mobile phones. So this is happening. One needs to be moving.

And there is a certain amount here, I think, for partners, of moving the train whilst laying the track. Those two things are important. I think the folks that wait will find themselves at a disadvantage just because it’s moving too quickly.

And in fact, you have to build a business model, just like we’re doing here from my own organization, that is dynamically learning and evolving, because the rate of change here and the applicability – I mean, if you think about two years ago, 18 months ago even, you and I were talking about LLMs. But now we’re talking about agentic workflows. We’re past the LLM. It’s really about the application of this technology with agents. And so even in that very short period, the applicability of this technology and how people consume it has changed pretty profoundly.

And so I think it’s super important every partner starts moving, because there’s a lot to learn and a lot to keep up with as this thing continues to accelerate.

Robert Dutt: All right, I’m going to ask this one just a little bit tongue in cheek, maybe. 2006, you arrived in Canada and AWS launched. 20 years later, you’re running AWS Canada. If the next 20 years of cloud and AI are as transformative as the last 20 years have been to this business, to this business model, what does the Canadian IT channel look like in 2046? Are there still resellers and MSPs, or has everything been reinvented? Just crystal ball for me.

Eric Gales: I think a lot is going to change. There’s no doubt about that. A lot is going to change. We very much see that, just as has been the case to date – if you think about it, IT has been about augmenting and working with humans and human processes and business processes. It’s created new business models. It’s allowed us to do things in new ways and to live, work, and play in all different ways.

This next era of the application of AI, in particular at scale, follows the same themes but creates incredible new opportunities. So I think we’re going to see a tremendous amount of change in terms of how we live, work, and play with this technology. But within the context of that, tremendous opportunities to be part of the solution versus part of the problem. Part of helping people to embrace and use and deploy all of these capabilities in ways that are value-added and respecting the things that we know are important – security and privacy and intellectual property protection. There is a tremendous opportunity, I think, ahead.

But I would not underestimate how profound the change is going to be over the course of, if you take that 20-year horizon, tremendous change. I think even over the course of the next few years, we’re going to see a lot of change in terms of how we work and how we live and how we interact with each other.

Robert Dutt: All right, a more sane final question for you, especially since it is the 20th birthday of AWS. If you could go back to 2006 and tell the Canadian channel one thing about where the cloud was going to take them, 20 years on to 2026, what would it be?

Eric Gales: I think, drafting off what we just talked about, it’s: don’t underestimate the opportunity here. When you have a new set of capabilities, back then with the birth of the cloud, there were people that embraced it very early on and were real beneficiaries of it. There are some partners I can think back to at the beginning, when I first came here to Canada, that really embraced that opportunity. And those that waited – those that waited missed out on a tremendous opportunity.

So I think I would go back, if I could, and just try and do a better job of helping people to appreciate what the opportunity was here and why the people that were early adopters of it had the most to gain.

And I think we’re in that moment now with AI. So the same again – I think tremendous opportunity here for Canada, for Canadian companies, Canadian partners to be the leaders in how these capabilities get applied to businesses and governments and how we work and live together. And so I’d say, lean in. Now is the time to lean in and work out how you can leverage this stuff to build a business and help businesses.

Robert Dutt: All right. A very happy 20th birthday to AWS. And Eric, thanks so much for taking the time.

Eric Gales: Thanks, Robert. Great to talk to you.

Robert Dutt: There you have it. Eric Gales, president of AWS Canada, on 20 years of AWS. Again, the official anniversary is tomorrow, March 14th.

I thought Eric’s point about the Harvard graphics card was a great one. The work disappears, but the opportunity doesn’t. It just changes shape. That’s been the story of the channel for as long as I’ve been covering it. And that’s the story again right now with AI.

Thanks to Eric for joining us. And thank you for listening. The podcast will be back on Monday with In Case You Missed It, our weekly roundup of some of the headlines that might have flown under the radar this week.

And next week on In The Channel, expect to hear about microsegmentation and why “contained by default” is replacing “detect and respond,” what Barracuda’s latest threat data says about how fast ransomware actually moves, and why the network visibility your business relies on might have more blind spots than you think.

Between now and then, we’d invite you to subscribe to or follow the podcast in your podcast app of choice. And if it allows you to, please leave a rating and review.

Until next time, I’m Robert Dutt for ChannelBuzz.ca, and I’ll see you in the channel.

Robert Dutt: Hello and welcome to In The Channel from ChannelBuzz.ca, bringing news and information to Canadian IT solution providers for 16 years now. I’m Robert Dutt, editor of ChannelBuzz.ca, and as always your host for the show.

If you’re an MSP, there’s a good chance your customers are already using AI tools that your team doesn’t know about. Nutanix recently released the 8th annual Enterprise Cloud Index, their big annual survey of how organizations are building and managing infrastructure. And this year, the data paints a picture that would be uncomfortable for anyone who thinks they’ve got a handle on where AI is running in their environment. Nearly 80% of respondents say they’ve encountered AI tools or agents deployed outside IT’s control. Data sovereignty has become a top priority, and containers are quietly becoming the default for new applications.

My guest today is Lee Caswell, Nutanix’s senior vice president of product and solutions marketing. Lee came to Nutanix from VMware, so he’s been watching the infrastructure market reshape itself from a vantage point that very few people have. We dig into what the survey data actually says, where the contradictions are, and what it means for MSPs and solution providers. Here’s our conversation.

Robert Dutt: Lee, thanks for taking the time.

Lee Caswell: Well, Robert, thank you.

Robert Dutt: You come to Nutanix from VMware, and your CEO now, Rajiv Ramaswami, he was the COO over there. Now you’re running this survey while the virtualization market is being reshaped by Broadcom’s changes. How does sitting where you sit now, having been kind of on both sides of that fence, shape how you look at this year’s data?

Lee Caswell: Well, I think it’s fascinating that for years, maybe 20 years, people just assumed that the underlying virtualization layer was fixed. That vSphere was well established, super product, exciting. A lot of people built their careers, frankly, on learning the ins and outs of vSphere. And to a lesser extent, some of the later add-on products. But the idea that the underlying virtualization layer has changed has, for the first time in years, had people reconsidering how they will build out their IT infrastructure for the next 10 years.

Robert Dutt: And we’ll circle back to that theme and that infrastructure theme a little later. But I wanted to dive in off the top into shadow AI, because it’s something that we’ve been talking about a fair bit on the podcast, and it’s something that a lot of partners are thinking about and trying to get their heads around how to deal with it. According to the survey, 79% of your respondents say they’re encountering AI tools or agents that are deployed outside the purview of IT. That’s a striking number. I’m curious, though, about the quality of the problem. Is this mostly folks who are using ChatGPT carelessly or without permission, or are we talking about the worst-case scenario of actual AI agents making business decisions willy-nilly without oversight?

Lee Caswell: Well, we’ve certainly seen some of those later examples, but I think the majority of this is rational decision-making on IT and developer teams. Thinking about the fact that AI infrastructure itself can be relatively expensive. GPUs, new servers, new hardware. You’re generally bringing new hardware into the mix to start with. And what customers have been doing is before they go and make their investment strategy, and particularly in on-prem environments, they’ve been trying things out in the cloud where you can rent infrastructure, you can basically start something up, spin it down. That’s kind of a classic test-dev model, by the way, not different from what we’ve experienced in the past.

And yet, when you look at how you’re going to deploy AI long-term with considerations around sovereignty and privacy, and particularly around predictable and lower costs, you start thinking about how you can take your on-prem infrastructure skills, which could include a data center but might also include the edge, and start thinking about how do you bring your already-strapped IT teams into this? And from a channel perspective, it’s how do you leverage some of the skills where people have been trained, particularly on virtualization. We’ll come back to this in just a minute. And basically apply this now into the new world of AI LLMs, AI hardware, and containerized infrastructure running on VMs.

Robert Dutt: So if I’m an MSP supporting that kind of mid-market client, the 200 to 1,000 seat kind of space, what does a practical response to shadow AI look like at this moment in time? Because, you know, “implement an AI governance framework,” that’s great in concept, but that’s the kind of consulting engagement that’s a little hard for a lot of MSPs to deliver.

Lee Caswell: Well, first off, you want to start thinking about what are the risks you’re trying to address. One is you want to look carefully at what LLMs your user base is actually using. One of the things that we’ve been able to do, for example, is have an audit trail, so you can look at who’s using DeepSeek, for example. Who’s using OpenAI? Who’s using some of the Llama 2, Llama 3 models, for example, or NVIDIA models? So the ability to go and look into the user base and get an assessment of that.

Secondly, you’re looking at how do you make sure you don’t have a runaway cost model? This was one of the risks in the early cloud days, you remember. You had users getting shocked with the amount of unplanned, unmanaged cloud costs. And so you’ve got this opportunity now to look at how do you manage a brand new metric of consumption, by the way, called a token. I defy you to find somebody who knows exactly how tokens are created and the like. That’s a very difficult challenge. If you can provide a predictable way to manage, monitor, and control the usage of tokens, we do that as a way to basically protect against runaway costs.

And then finally, the idea of sovereignty. So where is your data? Specifically, as you look at geopolitical considerations, we have, I think, a stunning finding that showed that 57% of our respondents said that they wanted their AI workloads to be within a sovereign country. Now, that doesn’t mean a single location necessarily, but it does show the concerns around where’s my data? Who can subpoena my data? Who’s got access to my data? And it may be, Robert, that the data model is more sensitive than the data itself, because the data model shows how you’re interpreting the data. And that’s actually a really interesting finding, I think, for a lot of folks, as AI takes hold so quickly.

Robert Dutt: And data sovereignty is an area that we want to drill down on. It’s an area that’s of key interest to our audience, obviously. You touch on the 57% number in terms of how customers want infrastructure in a single country. 80% say it’s a high priority. You wrote recently about what you called the “sovereign edge,” the idea that AI is forcing compute closer to data within sovereign boundaries. For a Canadian audience that’s been navigating this between different regulation at different levels, the US hyperscalers and the CLOUD Act, for years, what’s new here? Is this kind of validation that what they’re seeing is real, or is the ground really shifting here?

Lee Caswell: I think the sensitivity is a continuation of the trends that we’ve seen in the past. What’s changed is the understanding that in an AI world, data will be more distributed than it is today. And so imagine if you’re a hydro company, let’s say. And you’ve got different dams and facilities and hydro control points. These are distributed. They need to be able to run in a disconnected manner. You want to have AI applied locally. If you’re doing things around video processing, you don’t want to send all that data back to a central location.

And so the ability to have a distributed model where your data and apps are more distributed and yet be connected so that you can do patching, for example, day-two operations, security updates, and push those out to a distributed environment. Now the realization is sovereignty has grown in importance, and at the same time, my data and applications will be more distributed. That’s a double stressor for IT teams looking at how to maintain that control and let the agility of distributed operations continue on.

Robert Dutt: So are you seeing organizations redefine sovereignty in terms of operational control rather than just “the data lives here”? Because I think that distinction can matter pretty significantly for how MSPs ultimately architect their solutions and try to address this challenge.

Lee Caswell: Yeah, I think for MSPs, there’s a few important areas to think through. One is that customers who were looking for, let’s say, an infrastructure link are now looking for an AI dial tone. They’re expecting to have AI available, always on, no matter where they are, accessing it for their users. Because AI is quickly, as you can see from the data here, becoming a top corporate priority. So that’s one thing.

The second one is that the sovereignty means you need to make sure you’re controlling where is your data replicated to? Where does DR happen? How do you fail back within sovereign boundaries? Being able to establish that, something where the data services, something that you can establish or set as a differentiated capability, has been extremely important.

And then lastly, you start thinking about what about within the MSP? There’s a noisy neighbor issue, but there’s a nosy neighbor issue, which is how do I make sure that someone inside can’t cross boundaries internally in an MSP and look at your data being hosted in a common location? This is an area that you’re going to want to look carefully at multi-tenancy and how the infrastructure protects your data even when some of the infrastructure is shared across users.

Robert Dutt: So let’s shift and talk about containers, because I think that’s one of the areas that’s impactful but kind of hard for the audience to act on immediately. You have 87% increasing their containerization, 83% building new apps in containers. For MSPs who are still living in a virtual machine-centered world, which is probably a lot of them at this point in time, what’s the practical on-ramp? And honestly, how urgent is this? Do they have years to kind of figure this out and re-strategize, or is this a situation where if you’re not there, you’re already behind?

Lee Caswell: I think for many customers who are running traditional applications and let’s say they move from an owned data center into a service provider model, the idea is that the applications may not be changing as fast as the container world might have them think. However, what you’re seeing is that new applications are built with containers because developers benefit from running in containers.

What we’re finding though is most customers, the far majority of containers, are running in VMs. And they run in VMs because you’re able to now get the benefits of software agility – develop apps faster, eliminate testing dependencies, be able to run in distributed environments more quickly. Those benefits are married or matched with the resiliency of the underlying infrastructure so that individual components can fail. You can have day-two operations intact, and you’ve got integrated privacy and security and sovereignty.

The idea that you’re going to run these both – it turns out we allow customers to run containers depending on their use case. If they were going to run on a bare metal instance, they can. If they want to run in the public cloud on EKS, for example, they can run our container Kubernetes stack, take advantage of our orchestration capabilities, but they don’t have to. For many customers, the fastest path to adopting containers will be to run containers in VMs, very familiar to our users and to the service provider base.

What we’re encouraging them to get ready for is that even if they weren’t considering containers for traditional workloads, the fast adoption of AI workloads will bring a requirement for supporting containers. Think carefully around how do you leverage the training you already have, resilient infrastructure, all the things that our teams have been able to protect their downside, and still get access to the upside of new AI applications. We think running containers in VMs actually makes that the fastest path to container adoption.

Robert Dutt: On AI agents, the survey shows a great deal of optimism around them. The productivity gains, the new revenue streams, all of that. But you also note that, as we talked about before, 79% of organizations can’t quite figure out how to manage the tools their employees are already using. Can you walk me through that disconnect? How do you go from “we can’t govern what we have” to “let’s deploy autonomous agents”?

Lee Caswell: Yeah. Well, as you start thinking about what people have realized about AI, first, most customers have figured out that AI training will happen in the public cloud and that training requires huge investments, large power outlays that can only be taken on by the development of the models by the largest hyperscalers and some sovereign nations themselves. And so customers have been looking at, “I’m going to take models,” but then they quickly realize that the ability to have these models be useful in a particular company environment is dependent on having access to proprietary data.

Think of support. If you want to support a product, it’s not interesting to have support in a general sense. You want to have support for your products, things that you may not want to expose, internal documents that are proprietary and private to your specific company. So now what you’re doing is basically taking these models, giving them access to your private data. And now the idea is, “I’m going to be able to take that inferencing model,” which is what this is called. Taking inferencing means you can take advantage of a software platform that abstracts the new hardware that’s required, GPUs, and abstracts the different types of models that you may choose over time.

And so this is where you have these different LLMs. The ability to access those – we certify and validate the leading models so that they will run on the GPUs that are certified by our OEM partners. And so what we’re doing is taking out the risks. Effectively, what you do is leverage all the expertise you have for building an enterprise-level application today, and now be able to assimilate GPUs at the hardware layer and new LLMs at the software layer. And we’ll make it operate exactly the same as what you have today.

Robert Dutt: 65% say that their AI applications are running today via managed service providers. That’s a pretty validating number for our audience, except for maybe the few who are going to say, “Well, what about the other 35%?” But, you know, can’t please everyone every time. I want to push though on what running AI via MSP actually means in practice. Are we talking about infrastructure hosting, model development and management, governance and compliance? What’s the service that MSPs are actually delivering today versus what they should be thinking about building towards for the future as this evolves?

Lee Caswell: Yeah, I think the numbers overstate a little bit about how much training and skill building has actually happened already, because this would include things like SaaS-delivered services. And as you think of SaaS-delivered services like Copilot or ServiceNow or Salesforce, you’ll have AI-enhanced SaaS services that can be delivered by a service provider. What we’re anticipating and preparing service providers for is the idea that customers will, as they have private data to run their private models, be requiring dedicated equipment or provided services that give access to GPUs and LLMs that are beyond a SaaS-level model and now are actually specific applications for specific customer use case models.

Robert Dutt: We talked about shadow AI a little earlier. I’m curious, speaking of future states for MSPs, is there a world where the MSP becomes kind of the governed alternative to shadow AI? Essentially the sanctioned AI service layer? Because that seems like a bigger play and a little bit harder to get your head around, but a bigger opportunity than just, “Hey, we host applications on GPUs now as well as CPUs.”

Lee Caswell: I think so. And I think there’s a terrific both revenue and profit opportunity for service providers around this. First, there’s a services aspect of thinking about where do these applications run? Do they run in one location? Do they run across the hybrid cloud? So for anyone who’s working with cloud providers, how do I bridge this world out to this sovereign edge as we talked about? So that idea of how do I optimally locate applications, AI applications, and their associated data – that’s a very interesting workflow model to start with.

And then next up, I think, is the idea of, well, where and how do I maintain sovereignty within this model? Service providers have a terrific opportunity to say, “Here are the limits within which your data and applications can move. And I’m going to provide that and give you some audit capabilities to manage any compliance risks that you have.” So terrific opportunity, I think, for service providers to become, as you mentioned, that governed alternative.

And then finally, the idea that you would have a predictable cost model with tokens that allow you to share GPU resources means not just predictable, but lower cost than having an unpredictable model from the hyperscalers. We think this is actually a really compelling opportunity for service providers going forward.

Robert Dutt: Can’t let you go without asking this one directly. A lot of our audience is in the middle of evaluating their virtualization platforms because of what’s happened with Broadcom and VMware. Within the survey data, is there anything about how those infrastructure decisions intersect with AI and sovereignty, the things we’ve been talking about, that you’d like to share? Are organizations treating this transition and the AI buildout as separate projects, or do things start to connect in an overall infrastructure refresh rethink?

Lee Caswell: Well, I think some of the excitement from a service provider standpoint should be based on modeling or following what’s happening with the largest hyperscalers. I mean, you’re watching hyperscalers build out tens of billions of dollars of capital per month. We’ve never seen anything like this happen. And so that model, at a hyperscaler level, now what you’re thinking about is 82% from the survey of our respondents felt that their infrastructure was not fully ready for AI.

And so building this out – I called this an AI dial tone earlier. The idea that similar to how you remember, Robert, how when you went to hotels, when Wi-Fi came along, all of a sudden Wi-Fi became de rigueur. You had to have it. If it wasn’t fast enough, people knew right away and responded very quickly. My view is we’re going to have exactly the same response to having fast, secure, and managed AI dial tones, if you will, for AI workloads, where you can apply your custom data or your private data and do that quickly using skills that you already have.

For me, that means using a platform based on servers, based on certified GPUs, getting access to a changing set and world of LLMs. And being able to abstract both the hardware elements and the software elements means that you’re going to have customers be able to take all of the fast-changing AI world and bring it to their business problems more quickly.

Robert Dutt: Before we wrap, a couple of lightning round questions, if you will. If a Canadian MSP is listening to this and thinking, “Okay, I need to do something differently,” what’s kind of the one thing based on what this data is showing that you’d tell them to prioritize in the next 12 months in terms of transforming their business?

Lee Caswell: Yeah, I’d say number one is AI is coming. So prepare yourself. If you think you can get started nicely with small clusters, for example – one of the nice things about the Nutanix model is you can start small and grow from there. So start small, get a usable cluster ready for customers so they can try out how they can assimilate new GPU hardware, new AI LLMs. I think that’s essential.

Also, in the process, what will happen is they’ll get experience with this new world of containers without giving up their virtualization expertise. That’s an extremely important step. If you try and do everything at once, it can be a lot. There are competitive solutions that force you to go to a Kubernetes-oriented management model. That’s a step too far for most service providers. If you think now what you could do instead is leverage your familiar virtualization skills, bring in the containerization, and allow customers to get started on shared infrastructure with a predictable cost. That’s a winning strategy for providing an on-ramp to AI with the lowest risk and a fast uptake.

Robert Dutt: All right. And finally, so that the MSP audience can kind of keep an eye on what they need to keep in mind on the customer side, what’s the most dangerous assumption that you see IT leaders making right now about AI infrastructure?

Lee Caswell: I think the most concerning thing I see is customers who are racing to be AI fast without being AI smart. And we saw some of this in the early days of the cloud. We remember “cloud first” versus “cloud smart.” And what happened was you had blown-up costs, you had programs that weren’t successful. But I’d say the most important thing actually has nothing to do with the infrastructure itself. It has to do with corporate management making sure that the application of AI is tied to a specific business problem. That’s the most important element.

This is the thing I look for first. If you’re trying to solve an important business problem where you can ideally show that you can save money, generate more revenue, or do things more efficiently, those are the areas where you say AI is going to help here. Don’t just apply AI because it’s cool. Apply it because it’s going to solve a business problem, and you’ll find that you can actually move any infrastructure. We’ll bring that and make that work for you.

Robert Dutt: Once again, it all kind of flows back to business outcomes. That’s great advice. I love that. Lee, thanks so much for taking the time. I appreciate it.

Lee Caswell: Robert, I really appreciate it. Thank you.

Robert Dutt: There you have it. Lee Caswell from Nutanix on their 8th annual Enterprise Cloud Index. A couple of things I’d like to flag from that conversation. Lee’s distinction between a noisy neighbor and a nosy neighbor when it comes to multi-tenant environments and data sovereignty – that’s a framing worth sitting with if you’re thinking about how to position managed services around compliance. And his point about organizations racing to be AI fast without being AI smart – that’s one you can take directly to client conversations.

We’ll have a link to the full Enterprise Cloud Index report in the show notes, as well as a full transcript of the conversation. Tomorrow on the show, AWS Canada celebrates 20 years of the cloud. I sat down with Eric Gales to talk about what that milestone looks like from a Canadian perspective, and we’ll be back next Monday to catch you up on the headlines with In Case You Missed It. Between now and then, we’d invite you to subscribe to or follow the podcast in your podcast app of choice. And if it lets you, please do leave a review. Until next time, I’m Robert Dutt for ChannelBuzz.ca, and I’ll see you in the channel.

Robert Dutt: Hello and welcome to the ChannelBuzz.ca podcast, bringing news and information to the Canadian IT channel for the last 16 years. I’m Robert Dutt, still editor at ChannelBuzz.ca, and your host for the show.

Cybersecurity is one of those areas where the threats never stand still, and lately the pace of change seems to be even faster. As we head further into 2026, factors like artificial intelligence, global geopolitical tensions, and increasingly organised cybercrime are reshaping what risk looks like for businesses of all sizes.

Today we’re stepping back from the day-to-day headlines to talk about what’s coming next, what really matters beneath the noise, and what IT service providers and resellers should be paying attention to as they advise their customers.

My guest is Tony Anscombe, chief security evangelist at ESET, and a frequent flyer on the podcast. Tony spends his time analysing emerging threats, talking with security teams around the world, and translating complex security trends into practical guidance.

This conversation is focused on thought leadership and the big picture trends shaping cybersecurity this year, from AI-driven attacks and mobile threats to ransomware and the impact of global events on the digital world Canadians rely on every day.

It’s a great conversation, so let’s get right into it. My chat with ESET’s Tony Anscombe.

Tony, thanks once again for taking the time.

Tony Anscombe: Oh, it’s always a pleasure to chat with you, Rob.

Robert Dutt: I just wanted to take this opportunity to kind of take a look at where we’re at in cybersecurity in the early part of 2026 and get your thoughts on what to expect this year, sort of help our listeners, the VARs and MSPs of the world, get an overall feeling for where things are at, where they’re going. I guess to throw things open, when you look ahead at this year, what feels genuinely different about the threat landscape compared to, say, a year ago? I was going to say a year or two, but I think even a year in this rapidly changing place is plenty.

Tony Anscombe: Well, I think you’ve seen some pretty big incidents last year. None of them, I would say, are a catastrophic incident, whereas the year before we saw the likes of Change Healthcare and there was the CrowdStrike update and things that affect hundreds of millions of people all at the same time. But you had Jaguar Land Rover with a significant issue. You saw the Salesforce ransomware, the Oracle zero day that was exploited in their systems. Ingram Micro ransomware incident took down a lot of the distribution channel. So I think there were incidents that are interesting.

I think to an element, I’d kind of say that you’re going to see more of the same, but the same is becoming more sophisticated and is starting to change. Now, if you go back four or five years, we’d have told you that cybercriminals at some stage will start using AI technologies in there as we go. Then I meet people frequently that turn and say, “I’m being attacked by AI.” The answer to that is, no, you’re not. Stop watching Terminator at weekends. That’s my recommendation. You’re getting paranoid.

I say that, but the use of AI within cybercrime is making it more sophisticated. It’s making it more challenging to detect in certain instances and it’s becoming more challenging from a social engineering perspective. The sophistication and the likelihood of you clicking on something is unfortunately increasing.

I think if you look at cyber insurance reports that talk about claims and stuff like that, still 40% of people are paying. A lot of the things are business as usual. In fact, I spoke to a cyber insurer a couple of weeks ago, Rob, who gave me a snippet of information that I thought was fascinating. We talked about RDP a couple of years ago, you and I, about the issue of… and he said the majority of their claims are open VPN servers, where people have got a login page, ID and password to log into the VPN and they haven’t put MFA on it. VPNs have now taken the place of where RDP was, so that one seems to be moving down the chain a bit.

I took a look, I went on Shodan. I took a look on Shodan and sure enough, you can find lots of open VPN servers.

Robert Dutt: Just goes to show how some tools which are at least adjacent to security can be flaws as well. There’s no shortage of that. You already touched on a couple of them. You mentioned AI and obviously that’s the big subject of the industry and of business in general in 2025 and 2026. It seems like we’re at a place where right now, in many cases, it’s coming out in front of security, in front of management and in front of IT control, the whole shadow AI thing. I guess, what are your thoughts on where organizations are most exposed because of that gap that exists?

Tony Anscombe: Well, that’s a good point. The boardroom or the management teams in companies are going, “We need AI, we need AI,” because that’s what they’re hearing. Sure, it’s a great tool. If you look at a company like us at ESET, we’ve used AI in our products for two and a half decades or so. It’s not that new to us. But if you look at the latest iterations where a customer can get natural language help and stuff like that, you can sort through our threat intelligence easier. Those type of tools are where companies are at, isn’t it? It’s the customer interaction or it’s the knowledge base searching or it’s being able to get reasonable information quickly and meaningfully and in a nice way.

The problem is, a company takes all its data, throws it into an AI model and says, “Hey, AI, can you start helping my customers?” There’s likely to be personal information in there. They’re likely to leave APIs open and such like that then get abused. Before you do this, you need to have a cybersecurity person in the room. Now, that doesn’t mean you don’t do it. What that means is you do it in the right way. The cybersecurity person might turn and sit there and be the doomsday person and say, “Oh, no, we don’t want to do this.” But it’s then about explaining to the people that want it in the business about the risk and understanding where the level of risk lies and whether you’re comfortable and accepting of that risk.

We’ve seen some great examples of it, haven’t we? What was it, somebody bought a car from one of the car companies for a dollar or something, they managed to trick the AI chatbot into it. That’s the type of thing you want to be protecting against, making sure that you’ve got those guardrails in place. Also making sure it’s not going to surface some customer’s phone number or customer data inadvertently. Some customer in a previous call may have turned around and said, “Here’s my email address,” or “Here’s my phone number.” Of course, if that’s in your knowledge base somewhere or stacked in your support tickets, the right teasing of that information might bring it out and suddenly, in effect, you’ve got a customer data breach, which your AI told somebody. I’m just saying you don’t want that. You need to do it with security in mind. Make sure the agents are tied down correctly.

Now I saw there was an incident last year. I can’t remember which vendor it was with, Rob, but they had an API. It was an AI tool. They had an API for their customers to use. I think it was about 30 different customers were using it, or using the same ID and password. The password, by the way, I think was “default.”

Robert Dutt: Perfect.

Tony Anscombe: Right? So there you go. That’s just somebody doing it without too much thought. Put a cybersecurity person in the room, every customer would have had their own ID. There would have been stronger authentication, maybe certificate-based, and you wouldn’t have had that issue. It’s about having the cybersecurity people in the room with the business at the time you discuss it.

Robert Dutt: That’s an interesting place for MSPs because especially in the smaller end of enterprise and into SMB, when those discussions are taking place, often that MSP is going to be serving as the security person for an organization. It speaks to, I think, the need for you, even if you’re a third party to the company, you’ve got to have a strong seat to be able to say, “Hey, customer, this is all sounding great as far as innovation goes, but there’s stuff you need to think about here too.”

Tony Anscombe: Yeah, absolutely. But it’s also somewhere where the MSP actually shows up and provides the real value because if you can show that you’re reducing the company’s business risk, then that’s what you’re there to protect, isn’t it? I would have thought it actually cements you further into the company because the more projects you get involved in, the more you understand their business, the harder it is for that company to actually change MSP. You embed that customer relationship, which is kind of the holy grail, isn’t it? That’s what you want as a service provider.

Robert Dutt: Absolutely. Your research talks about smartphones as an increasingly attractive target. No argument there, it makes sense. It’s where a lot of people are doing their computing, right? It’s an interesting space in that sometimes it’s under IT control. Sometimes it’s not. Sometimes it’s a little bit of both. I guess what’s changed about mobile threats that MSPs and businesses should be paying more attention to right now?

Tony Anscombe: Well, I’m smiling, Rob, sat here listening to you say that because I’ve got two phones on my desk. One of them is very controlled and one of them is mine.

Robert Dutt: Wild West.

Tony Anscombe: Yeah, well, it’s not the Wild West. Mine is controlled by me, not the company. But it’s a good point because if you look at people’s phones, they need to be under some sort of MDM service. If you’re allowing somebody to use their own device, then you need the ability to delete data. You need the ability to track the phone if it’s lost, delete the data and control the apps. Potentially have some sort of compliance on the security settings that are on the phone. If the person hasn’t got biometric unlock on the phone, then maybe you don’t want to install your stuff on there at all. It’s not just about having that container for the company data that you control, but it’s also having a minimum set of security standards on the phone, that the phone itself is secure. Bear in mind, you’re helping actually your employees secure their phone in that scenario as well. But yeah, the more and more devices you see, the more and more I think compliance you need to do on them. I don’t think that will change anytime soon.

Robert Dutt: Ransomware, obviously the constant presence, the constant scourge. It keeps evolving, but the pattern keeps repeating in that a lot of the successful attacks are relying on maybe not the same weak points, but familiar weak points. I guess, why do we still see these same mistakes playing out? And what, if anything, can I do about that as an MSP?

Tony Anscombe: Well, certainly one of the things MSPs need to do is make sure the customer is being trained, but also make sure your own staff are being trained as well. If you look at… and I wouldn’t want to put a percentage on it, but it’s a big number. If you look at the number that involve some form of social engineering, unfortunately – social engineering, you know, phishing, text messaging, physical phone calls – it’s never-ending. The elements of social engineering are huge there.

I mean, I can’t remember whether we spoke about ClickFix last year. ClickFix was an interesting malware family. They used, one of the variants used the screen that says, “Are you a robot?” We all click the box, don’t we? And they’re very creative. Then it says, “Can you press these three keys on your keyboard to verify you’re human?” And what actually the three keys do is they invoke a PowerShell script. And there you go, you’re now breached.

But it’s those sophisticated mechanisms such as that, that you need to make sure your employees understand, and your staff and your customer staff. So within the MSP, that you’re doing regular training, regular, even for your technical people.

I worked for a company, Rob, when I first started my career in finance. It was a credit card company. And they used to run a program where a fictitious fake card member would sit there ringing numbers in the company each day, internal numbers. And your phone would ring and you’d pick the phone up and it would be a fake card member. And you had to own the call. Everybody in the company had to own the card member, regardless of whatever your job was. I’d love to see tech companies doing something similar.

Robert Dutt: Yeah.

Tony Anscombe: MSPs could be doing something like this with their customers. Can I randomly phone up your staff and see if I can socially engineer a password out of them? Not because I want to embarrass them, but because I want to be able to show that it can be done and then improve things beyond it. Wouldn’t that be a great service? It’s like phishing simulation, but with a person.

Robert Dutt: Interesting idea.

Tony Anscombe: Yeah. But if I ran an MSP myself, I think I’d be doing that on my own staff because I wouldn’t want to be, unfortunately, the supply chain into my customer that gets breached, that ends up seeing my customers breached. And there were a few of those, unfortunately, I think last year. I think Marks & Spencer were that way. And I think Jaguar Land Rover may have been through a third party as well. So I think there are some really interesting examples where third parties were unfortunately responsible.

Robert Dutt: Well, yeah. It speaks to kind of that trend too, where a lot of times those who are doing the attacks are looking at that as an increasingly viable way in because there’s potential for there to be a gap between organizations that no one’s really… everyone assumes that everyone else is kind of looking at it, maybe.

Tony Anscombe: Yeah, absolutely. There are other things I think MSPs… MSPs need to show their customers that they’re 100% secure, that they’ve gone through the same programs that actually customers

do as well. One thing I think, if an MSP doesn’t go through what I define as regular cyber insurance type requirements, to me that would be a good thing for them to do, because cyber insurers kind of push that whole reduction in risk.

Robert Dutt: That is rapidly becoming table stakes, isn’t it? That’s an expectation. Continuing along that line, for MSPs who are kind of planning out their security strategy, their security approach for the rest of the year, I guess what’s one assumption or one thing they’re doing that they should probably challenge or change at this moment in time?

Tony Anscombe: One thing to change, that’s a big question. Only take on customers that are secure.

Robert Dutt: Problem solved.

Tony Anscombe: Yeah. Don’t allow your customers to have any connectivity. No. It’s to make sure that you’re keeping pace with the advanced technologies that are out there. For example, we’ve seen EDR become MDR and XDR, but are you now plugging in good, accurate threat intelligence feeds into that EDR? Whoever’s EDR you’re using, obviously, I’d love everybody to use ESET’s, by the way. But if they’re offering that as a managed service from an MSP, I’d also couple that with threat intelligence feeds and APT reports. If you’ve got government customers, actually start taking it to the next level so that it’s not just about relying on the monitoring and detection of an issue, but also that you’re intelligently looking beyond where other issues might come through other industries or what’s happening elsewhere.

Robert Dutt: And taking that same kind of idea, but turning it around from a customer-facing perception. If you were advising an MSP on how to talk to clients about cyber risk this year and what they should be thinking about going forward, how does that conversation need to change in light of the changing threatscape?

Tony Anscombe: Well, firstly, now that’s an interesting term. I’m guilty of using the term cyber risk. If I was in the MSP shoes today, I would not be talking about cyber risk. I’d be talking about business risk. I think cyber is becoming a risk just like any other risk to a business, i.e. theft, fire, building collapsing, earthquakes, whatever it might be that we tend to have risk. And cyber now needs to be treated as that risk. You’ve got to talk to a business in the terms of it being a business risk.

There are some really good examples in the market now. I mentioned Jaguar Land Rover just a moment ago. Think about that entire incident. A third party to them gets breached and Jaguar Land Rover gets taken down through it. It affected 5,000 businesses. The UK government stepped in and bailed them out with PS1.6 billion. That’s a huge amount of money.

If you and I had a little company, we’re making screws for gearboxes. It’s all very well somebody coming to me and turning around and saying, “Cyber risk.” But what I really want to know is the business risk. How much is it going to cost my business if I have this incident? What is my downtime going to be? Talk to them in the business language and put it in real terms. It self-justifies, by the way, then the expenditure on cybersecurity because you’re talking to them about the finance of the business. I kind of stopped talking about, you know, “70% of ransomware attacks start as phishing.” Great, those are supplemental, but talk to them about actually how they keep their business running.

Robert Dutt: I think it speaks to a broader trend in the channel of over time, moving from speaking about technology to speaking about solutions to increasingly speaking about outcomes. I think we’re talking about now the business outcomes of security investment.

Tony Anscombe: Yeah, absolutely. To a lot of this, this is the decision of the CFO of where is the acceptable business risk. Then it’s about putting the right cyber plan in place to meet the line of business risk. And by the way, we all have risk in different… our line will all be in different places. If 10 of us stand in a casino in Las Vegas and we’ve all got $200, we’re all going to behave completely differently when we walk up to the roulette table.

Robert Dutt: Yeah, absolutely. And depending on where we’re at, we may have additional oversight, which colours our risk decision-making and depending on what… in this case, in what industry you’re in, for example.

Tony Anscombe: Well, exactly. Every CFO and every business will have a different line in the sand of where their business risk is.

Robert Dutt: You obviously get to spend a whole lot of time looking at what’s there and what’s coming in terms of security. I’m curious, is there anything that’s surprising you about the current security scene?

Tony Anscombe: Well, the one thing that we’ve seen in the last six months… we’re being attacked, but let’s come back full circle here. We’re being attacked by AI. We have seen a couple of examples of malware. At this stage, they appear to be proof of concepts of AI-based malware. What that means is it’s actually dynamically using AI within the malware to generate the attack. It’s looking at the environment and then using the environment, asking AI to then generate scripts and code on the fly in real time. They’re using public AI models to do this. It will create the script and then they attack with that script.

Now, in theory, that means you’re using a never-before-seen piece of code within the attack, which obviously makes it very challenging to detect. The two instances we’ve seen, one was PromptLock. The other one, we published details in the last few weeks, PromptSpy. One was on a Windows, macOS and Linux platform. The other one, a few weeks ago, was on an Android platform.

We’re seeing the emergence of that type of code. So lower barrier to entry. Now that code’s out there in the marketplace. Difficult-to-detect attacks. I think you’re going to see that expand over this next year.

Now, interestingly, one of those examples I just used, PromptLock, was a project by a university student. That’s what it transpired to be, but they put it in the public domain. Need I say more? Please don’t do this.

[Laughter]

Robert Dutt: I guess it was a matter of time that once the idea of vibe coding became kind of mainstream, that it was going to get turned back around and used in some sort of malicious way. That is one true trend across security over time. They will take advantage of the tools that are available.

Tony Anscombe: They will. But I expect to see more of that AI-generated code out there over this next year. The challenge then is making sure the technologies that are in place, those advanced technologies, are picking up those advanced attacks because it will become more challenging as it goes.

Robert Dutt: Tony, as always, so much going on in the security space, but you’ve given us some good things to think about. I think most importantly, some actionable things to think about as you’re running the security practice of an MSP. Appreciate your taking the time, as always.

Tony Anscombe: Hey, always a pleasure, as I said, Rob.

Robert Dutt: There it is, my conversation with Tony Anscombe, chief security evangelist at ESET. Whether it’s the rise of AI-powered malware, open VPN servers quietly becoming the new weak link, or simply learning to talk about security in business terms, there’s a lot here for MSPs to think about as we move through 2026. I’d like to thank Tony for joining us once again. Thank ESET Canada for their ongoing support of the site. And of course, thank you for listening today.

We’ll be back in your feed tomorrow as we’re joined by Lee Caswell from Nutanix to discuss the company’s 8th Annual Enterprise Cloud Index Report, and with a special episode on Friday as we discuss Amazon Web Services at 20 with AWS Canada chief Eric Gales. You’ll want to be sure you catch those, so please do subscribe to or follow the podcast in your podcast app of choice. And if it allows you to do so, please consider leaving a review or rating of the show.

Until next time, I’m Robert Dutt for ChannelBuzz.ca, and I’ll see you in the channel.

Robert Dutt: Hello and welcome to In The Channel from ChannelBuzz.ca, bringing news and information to the Canadian IT channel for the last 16 years. I’m Robert Dutt, editor of ChannelBuzz.ca, and as always your host for the show.

Check Point Software has been making some big moves. Under new CEO Nadav Zafrir, the company has acquired five companies since early 2025, including three announced simultaneously in February: Cyclops, Cyata, and Rotate. And these aren’t random bolt-ons. They map to a deliberate four-pillar strategy that Check Point says defines the future of the platform.

Those four pillars are: Hybrid Mesh Network Security, covering data centers, cloud, SASE, and SD-WAN. Workspace Security, protecting endpoints, email, browsers, and SaaS applications. Exposure Management, giving organizations visibility into their full attack surface. And AI Security, governing the new wave of autonomous AI agents operating inside enterprise environments.

For solution providers, the most interesting piece here might be the Rotate acquisition. It’s an acqui-hire that brings in a team with deep roots in the MSP ecosystem, including veterans of Datto and Kaseya. Cyclops adds a data lake with over 150 integrations for attack surface management. And Cyata tackles a category that barely existed a year ago: identity management for AI agents.

To unpack the strategy and what it means for the channel, I sat down with Roi Karo, Check Point’s chief strategy officer, and Angelo Valentini, who leads Check Point’s Canadian partner business. Roi brings an unusual perspective – 25 years in Israeli defense intelligence and a stint as chief risk and strategy officer at blockchain infrastructure company Fireblocks before joining Check Point.

Here’s our conversation.

Gentlemen, thank you for taking the time. I appreciate it.

Roi Karo: Thank you very much.

Angelo Valentini: Thanks for having us.

Robert Dutt: Roi, before we dive into strategy itself, you come to Check Point from Fireblocks, and before that, 25 years in the IDF and on that side of the world. Pretty unique lens. I’m just curious, how does that shape how you think about security strategy versus someone who’s grown up and spent that kind of time inside the cybersecurity vendor world?

Roi Karo: Yeah, that’s interesting. I think it gives a unique perspective, being part of the Israeli intelligence security, and it gives, I think, a wide view of how things are shaping. And it’s part of what we’re trying to answer today. The biggest hurdle I’m trying to uncover is what is going on. What’s going on in the world, what is going on in the market, and of course, how should we react as a security company. And I think my background gives an interesting perspective for that. And stating what is obvious, in Israel, many people in the cybersecurity industry are veterans of the Israeli defense forces. So it’s an interesting background and a very useful background to be part of the security ecosystem in Israel.

Robert Dutt: You guys announced three acquisitions simultaneously, and that’s following last year, which saw Lakera and Veriti. That’s an aggressive pace. I guess, what do you see as the strategic urgency driving the acquisitions? Is it about AI creating new categories of risk, or is it about the competitive landscape forcing your hand? Is it a little bit of both? What’s driving this?

Roi Karo: Yeah, I think both and maybe some more. Stating the obvious, things are changing faster than before. Everybody’s talking about how AI is changing the world. Something that everybody says in their first sentence: everything is faster. Things that before took years now take weeks and even days. So we can’t just wait. We need to move fast, faster than we moved before. So acquisition is a great way to move faster. When we find a very strong team that has a very good product that can help our portfolio and give us good products that we can suggest or offer to our customers, this is something that we’re very interested in.

And I think, as you mentioned, the competitive landscape – competitors are also moving faster. So we need to keep pace. And the last thing I would add, Check Point as a large company offers a wide variety of solutions. We’re very known for our firewalls and network security, but if we’ll have more time, we can talk about the other pillars. And actually all three new acquisitions are supporting and accelerating our other product pillars. So offering a consolidated solution to our customers is one of our biggest strategic moves, and all of those acquisitions are helping us to get faster through this target.

Robert Dutt: You kind of presage where I was going next, which is, in your blog post, you frame four pillars of where Check Point is going, what you want to be locking down. And as you rightly point out, Check Point has that history, that strength in network security. The newer bets, especially both exposure management and AI security, which is obviously nascent – it seems like they require different muscles, different skill sets, different approaches from Check Point and from partners alike. Where are the real capability gaps that needed filling?

Roi Karo: Yeah, so I think when talking about gaps, there are different types of gaps. One type of gap is mostly on the AI front. Everything is new. So to be very honest, I think that the security industry is still learning how to secure AI. So we have gaps. Everybody has gaps because it’s so new. We’re inventing new things. We’re building new kinds of security solutions. And that’s one type of a gap.

A different type of a gap is that we have products for many years and we want to have better solutions, acquiring features or products that can help us accelerate closing those types of gaps. But I think the first type is more interesting because those are purpose-built solutions that did not exist before. This is where the true innovation is happening. And without that, nobody will be able to secure the new types of attacks that we’re seeing in the wild.

Angelo Valentini: Robert, if I could just add – on the partner side, I think some of the gaps and concerns are really about visibility, governance, and also about operational efficiency. I think that’s one of the things that we’re trying to help partners with in terms of what their concerns are relative to AI, relative to exposure management, all these areas.

Robert Dutt: You describe this whole scenario as an open garden platform, which is a nice framing versus the walled garden approach. For MSPs who are running multi-vendor security stacks and representing multiple security vendors, which, let’s be honest, is the vast majority – what does that open garden mean in practice for them?

Roi Karo: Yeah, so I think a couple of things. Our philosophy is openness. We’re not trying to create any kind of vendor lock. We play with all vendors. You mentioned the acquisition from last year of Veriti. That’s a great example because what Veriti offers is the ability to patch or virtually patch all of your security vendors. If you have a threat that you discovered, now you want to make sure that you’re actually being defended against it. So what Veriti does is go over all of those exposures and close them. And when they say close them, they close it using a Check Point security product, but also all other vendors. So we have integration even with our competitors, other types of vendors.

So that’s one example of how we try to build our solutions in a way that supports all the other players, because we acknowledge what you said. Most vendors and even most companies, they don’t want vendor lock. They want to use several vendors. They want all of them to play together. So we design our solutions in an open way. It can be used with APIs, it can call to other types of solutions and help MSPs or customers, other types of customers, to build their full stack of solutions.

Robert Dutt: That kind of maps, I think, with things that I’ve been hearing more and more from partners. Back in the day, you’d hear a lot of, “I want to work with fewer security vendors.” Still, no one’s saying, “Hey, I want to sign up 400 security vendors and try to understand the nuance of what all of them are doing.” That’s operationally impossible. What I hear more, I think, is the idea of, “I want to have a few strategic security vendors and I want them, where possible, to play nicely together in my environment.”

Roi Karo: Absolutely, I can’t agree more. I think consolidation is important. Nobody wants 400. Nobody wants even 40 vendors. It’s hard. But nobody wants one vendor. I think that in a way, we’re trying to figure out this balancing, this sweet spot between having hundreds of vendors and having one vendor.

And what we do is – the reason we picked those four pillars is because we truly believe that we’re leaders in each one of them and we have the best solution in each one of them. And anywhere that we don’t have a solution, we partner. So a good example is CNAPP. We have a strategic partnership with and other CNAPP vendors. So we don’t have our own CNAPP solution. We integrate it with another vendor. And everywhere we don’t have the best solution, we’ll integrate with the best vendors that are out there.

Robert Dutt: Okay, let’s talk a little bit about the acquisitions that were made that start to build out this platform, or continue to build out this platform. And I wanted to start with Rotate specifically, because I think it’s really interesting for this audience. You acquired them, it seems, primarily for the team. And that team includes key people who come from a background in Datto, in Kaseya – companies that really built up the foundations of the MSP ecosystem of today. What does that signal about how you guys are looking at the MSP market and the MSP opportunity for Check Point?

Roi Karo: Yeah, so I will zoom out a bit and then focus specifically. When we announced the workspace pillar, we realized among other things that companies want to manage the whole end user security through one vendor, through one unified management, and not point solutions. So we took our endpoint solution, our email solution, browser, mobile – all the solutions we have around the end user – bundled them together, and are offering a way to manage all of them from a unified management.

That is something that is unique and I think is very compelling to all types of customers and mostly MSPs, for obvious reasons. They want to manage all of this end user security from one vendor, from one management. And doubling down on MSPs, we understand their needs. We have many MSPs as customers and we want to provide an easy way to manage all their tenants, all their end users in one single pane of glass. And that’s what we’re building, and this is what we want to accelerate with the team of experts coming from Rotate.

Angelo Valentini: So Robert, in Canada, as you know, 90% of the businesses are SMB. So this is a huge opportunity for partners as we go and develop this and enhance that solution for our partners. It’s a huge opportunity.

Robert Dutt: And speaking of huge opportunity, the email security business that’s already – I think I saw 160 million is the figure for Check Point’s revenue line there – as well as being one of the most foundational tools that MSPs bring to market and have fueled that business. I’m curious to get your thoughts on how you build from that beachhead that you’ve got established in email security and into that broader workspace security story that Rotate is facilitating.

Roi Karo: I think email security, as you said, it’s so fundamental. And when we try to explain to people how AI is changing the hackers, this is the easiest example because it’s most common and easy to explain and imagine. Phishing attacks look different now with AI-based attacks. We all did this training that you need to find spelling mistakes and grammar mistakes to identify phishing. As you can imagine, there are no spelling and grammar mistakes anymore when phishing emails are being built or crafted with AI.

So email security is being changed and being reinvented. And we are building new types of email security to make sure that we’re securing also for the most advanced AI-based phishing attacks. Our email security is something that we take a lot of pride in and we can prove that it is better than many others. So that’s, as you said, a great beach entry through many of what we’re doing with our customers. And adding the other capabilities on top of the email is super important.

Because again, using a very simple example: someone got a link, they pressed it because it wasn’t blocked. And now they have malware on their computer. You want that endpoint security to be connected to the email security and have one platform that can see everything and can actually prevent attacks before they happen. So we integrated our endpoint solution, our browser extension, our mobile solution, and the email together into one threat intelligence layer that provides data to all of those solutions.

Robert Dutt: Cyata is about governing AI agents, which as well as being the buzzword of the day is also a category that didn’t exist a few years ago, because AI agents themselves did not exist a few years ago. For an MSP today, is security around AI agents something that their customers are asking about? Or is this one of those things that’s in a “be ready for this now so you can sell it tomorrow” kind of space?

Roi Karo: Yeah, I think that this will grow very fast because, as I’ve mentioned, AI is moving faster than we imagined. When we say agents, I think there are two separate use cases, and one of them is very relevant to the MSP.

One that is less relevant is building AI applications that use agents. This is for bigger organizations and more sophisticated organizations that have engineers and are building their own software. But all of us are using agents. ChatGPT and Claude today, you just press a button and you’re running an agent from your endpoint. That is something that is happening. It’s the more advanced user today, but tomorrow it will be all of us using agents running on their endpoints.

And one of the things that Cyata built, and we’re now adding to our products, is a capability running on the laptop of the end user, identifying agents that are running there on behalf of the users. It can identify and, first of all, give visibility into all the agents that are running from the end user’s computer, but also provide governance and policy that make sure that they’re doing only things that they’re allowed, that they’re using the right identities, that they have access only to things that they are supposed to have access to. And this is something that I believe will be very relevant to MSPs in the near future, sooner rather than later, because it’s related to all the end users, all the people that are using AI.

Angelo Valentini: Robert, this also plays nicely with some of the government compliance developments with the Canadian government. So Bill C-26, for example, is all about governance and compliance. This is a great way in which this acquisition plays right into the government legislation. Insurance is another big thing where we’re seeing a lot of compliance requirements, and also financial institutions. So this is just another way that this plays into that compliance as well.

Robert Dutt: Last but not least on the acquisitions, can you give me a bit of a feel for how Cyclops fits in, what they bring to the table, and the opportunity you see there for your partners?

Roi Karo: Yeah, absolutely. And again, zooming out and zooming back into Cyclops. We just announced our Exposure Management pillar. We acquired, I think almost two years ago, CyberInt. They’re doing external risk management – they’re scanning the organization from the outside and providing all the data you can achieve from looking at the organization, the company, from the outside. Dark web and the organization itself.

Six months ago, we acquired Veriti, that takes all of the data, all of the exposures, all of the threats, and mitigates them automatically. So you have automatic remediation. And now with Cyclops, we completed the full cycle, because they are scanning the organization internally. This is an asset management capability that actually connects to hundreds of vendors that provide data. And then you have the full picture of what’s going on inside your organization.

So CyberInt’s capabilities are scanning from the outside, Cyclops’ capabilities are scanning from the inside, and Veriti’s capabilities take all of this intelligence – and all the intelligence we acquired in decades of building our capabilities – and make sure that all of this is being remediated. In this way, we accomplished the full cycle of what Gartner calls CTEM, Continuous Threat Exposure Management, and provide a very unique value proposition to our customers of having the full cycle of understanding what is happening across your attack surface, identifying the threats, and remediating the threats. Cyclops provided a very important piece of the puzzle that we were missing, and we’ll integrate them very quickly into our value proposition and offer a full cycle of CTEM.

Robert Dutt: How quickly do these acquisitions – you mentioned the plan for Cyclops there – but how quickly do these become native Check Point experiences rather than adjacent tools that are also on the Check Point line card?

Roi Karo: Very quickly in those three cases, because they’re part of a wider value proposition. It’s not a standalone – all of them started as a startup with a standalone capability, but the real magic and the real value will come when we integrate them. That will happen very quickly because all of those solutions are very modern in design, which makes it easier. And part of the due diligence we did around all of them is how quickly we can integrate. So this will be integrated very quickly. And of course, now – as I say, everything is happening faster – we are using AI to build products and integrate products. So that will happen very fast, and this will be offered to our customers immediately.

Robert Dutt: Zooming back out to the strategy level, if I’m a Canadian MSP with managed seats numbered in the hundreds – typical SMB-focused MSP – today I’m running Check Point email security, maybe firewalls. When I look at this strategy, what is this going to change about what I sell and how I operate over the next 12 months?

Roi Karo: I think CTEM and exposure management becomes even more important than before. Maybe we need to take one step back with your permission. I think that the threat landscape is changing, and that’s something that we all need to acknowledge. Just imagining how the attackers are using AI in order to accelerate their attacks – things that before took attackers months or years to build, to find new vulnerabilities, we’re seeing right now happening much faster. The scale, the sophistication of attacks is changing. And we all need to prepare. Vendors, MSPs, and other types of organizations need to make sure that they are prepared for a new wave of attacks.

And for that, you need to have everything that can help you understand. We talked about my background – intelligence is super important to understand what is going on. And exposure management is exactly that: understanding what is going on. Are you attacked? Where are you exposed? Who is attacking you? You can’t fly blind.

So the first thing I would add to my portfolio if I’m an MSP is offering threat intelligence, offering exposure management, scanning all of my customers and making sure that they’re not exposed, finding servers they have that are exposed, finding PII that is related to them on the dark web, and making sure that I’m warning them. Many kinds of solutions we have as part of our exposure management value proposition I think will be very interesting for MSPs. So that’s one thing I would explore with Check Point.

The second thing is AI, of course. We talked about agents, but even the basic LLM use of end users, that’s something that needs to be governed. Angelo mentioned compliance, it will become part of it. Even if you’re a small law firm and you want to make sure that your lawyers are obeying the rules that you decided – can they use ChatGPT in order to write a legal document? If it’s a small medical company, can they consult ChatGPT on medical issues? What is the PII guidance you give them? Can they put PII in ChatGPT or not? All of this needs to be governed, and our products enable that. They run on the endpoints, they make sure that you’re aware of what all of your employees, all of the people in the company are doing with AI, and they can enforce governance on what you want to allow and what you want to block. Do you allow DeepSeek in your organization? Do you allow other types of LLMs or GPTs?

All of this, as part of AI security, is something that MSPs will need to adopt and educate themselves on, and educate their end users very quickly. And what we’re building is a full suite of AI security. We’ll have offerings for small companies, offerings for large enterprises, and everything in between.

Angelo Valentini: You touch on AI governance, we talked about exposure management. These are ideas that sound consultative and complex, which is great because channel 101: where there’s mystery, there’s margin, and there is ample mystery here. But again, through the lens of that SMB-focused MSP, how do I get to it? So I guess what I’m getting at is, how are you helping partners productize those conversations they need to have without requiring them to go super deep themselves as AI specialists?

I think that’s the bread and butter of partners today, is the service offering. When they see acquisitions like this, we play in all their wheelhouse in terms of all the areas: visibility, governance, and also operational efficiency. So that’s the number one thing. It’s our job to enable our partners as well as part of it. Me in the partner community, we go and enable our partners to understand the technology and understand the opportunity. And there are consulting opportunities here, there’s increased revenue opportunity here. That’s one of the things that we focus on, is really to get awareness to the partners so they understand: hey, there’s an opportunity here for incremental revenue, for increased opportunity in consulting and implementation. And then from there, there’s ancillary AI solution revenue that follows. So it’s up to the partner to decide, but it’s really something that they should consider.

Robert Dutt: Just to wrap things up before we go, do you have time to do two quick lightning round questions, quick answers? First of all, what’s one assumption about cybersecurity that you think partners need to stop making right now, or at least over the course of this year?

Roi Karo: I think that the basic assumption is that we have time, that sophisticated attacks are not here yet, and we have time to learn, we have time to adjust, and everything will be okay. I think that’s terribly wrong. I think that the attackers, they don’t have the governance and legal obligations that we have as companies. So they’re running very fast. It’s happening now.

So I think a wrong assumption that many people have, MSPs included, is: okay, it’s still early, we can learn, we can take our time. I think we need to move fast and we need to move faster than we’re moving.

Robert Dutt: And taking that similar lens but turning it inside this time, what’s the hardest internal debate that you’re having at Check Point right now about AI and security, and why isn’t it settled yet?

Roi Karo: We understand that we need to offer AI as a part of – we talked about many angles of AI, one that we did not mention, and I will use your question to address it – is using AI for security. We talked about AI for the attackers, we talked about AI that everybody’s using and we need to secure. Part of what we’re building in a very innovative way is autonomous security – AI agents that are running security. And this of course is the biggest promise. And many people feel that we need to move much faster on this front.

It’s not easy. And we’re building it in many parallel lanes, because it’s hard to predict what will win. But we understand that the future of security – you need to fight AI with AI, you need to adopt AI. And this is maybe the biggest promise of our industry, when the industry will be able to adopt AI and leverage the power of AI in order to provide better security. And in many ways, in bigger organizations, the department that needs to adopt AI the fastest is the security department. Because for all the other departments, this is a force multiplier, it changes everything, but in a way it’s a nice to have. For security, because the attackers are using AI, if security people won’t adopt AI for themselves and use AI to secure their organization, they will lose.

So we’re trying to do our best in offering our customers AI-based security. We have today in all of our pillars co-pilots and MCP servers and agentic capabilities. But we aspire much higher. We want to build real autonomous security, real AI employees – AI security employees that will be part of the team. We have very exciting, innovative teams that are building those kinds of things. And answering your question, the debate is: can we, or how can we, move faster on this front, offering our customers fully autonomous, fully AI-based security.

Robert Dutt: That’s a pretty good overview and view of the strategy and of where you think things are at. Good luck with the acquisitions and rolling them in and continuing to broaden out the strategy. And thank you very much for taking the time for this conversation.

Roi Karo: Thank you for hosting us. It was a pleasure. We’ll be in touch.

Angelo Valentini: Great to be here.

Robert Dutt: There you have it, a look at Check Point’s push to reshape its platform around AI security, exposure management, and the MSP workspace, with Roi Karo and Angelo Valentini.

The takeaway I keep coming back to: Check Point isn’t just buying technology here. They’re making a deliberate bet on the MSP market, and hiring a team from Datto and Kaseya to build it out is the strongest signal of that intent. Whether you’re already in the Check Point ecosystem or not, the open garden approach they’re describing is worth paying attention to. And Roi’s point about urgency is one that I’d take seriously. The window to learn and prepare is shorter than a lot of people think.

Thanks to Roi and Angelo for a great conversation. And thank you as always for listening.

Also this week on ChannelBuzz.ca: on Wednesday, ESET’s Tony Anscombe joins me to walk through the security trends and threats solution providers should be watching this year. On Thursday, I sit down with Nutanix SVP Lee Caswell to dig into their latest Enterprise Cloud Index research, including what the data says about shadow AI, data sovereignty, and where infrastructure decisions are heading. And on Friday, a bonus episode – AWS Canada’s Eric Gales joins me for a look back at 20 years of AWS and what it means for partners going forward.

If you’re enjoying the show, please take a moment to subscribe or follow in your podcast app of choice. And if you’re feeling generous, a rating or review goes a long way to helping other solution providers find us.

Until next time, I’m Robert Dutt for ChannelBuzz.ca, and I’ll see you in the channel.